JEZIČNO-STILSKA OBILJEŽJA KOČERINSKE PLOČE
LINGUISTIC AND STYLISTIC FEATURES OF THE KOČERIN TABLET

Summary/Abstract: Humanity’s age-old desire not to be forgotten and to leave a mark on this world is expressed in a unique way on tombstones and stećci. These „stone sleepers,“ as Mak Dizdar calls them, are primarily perceived by the public as historical and cultural monuments studied by historians and archaeologists, with their verbal component mostly the subject of paleographic interest. Recently, there has been a growing interest in them as monuments of linguistic history and the linguistic culture of a particular region and time. This paper is motivated by the need to approach this heritage from a linguistic and, particularly, a stylistic perspective. The language of the Kočerin tablet will be analyzed at the phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic levels. The conciseness of the text naturally determines the scope and possibilities of analysis, but it nevertheless establishes the ratio between vernacular and literary language. The paper will also address the stylistic features of the epitaph: conciseness, the existence of patterns, conventional structuring of inscriptions, etc. Some stylistic features, such as rhetorical figures, render the Kočerin tablet an aesthetic artifact whose form serves not only to express facts or impressions but is an end in itself, achieved precisely through these characteristics and figures. The paper also draws attention to the narrative nature of this text, which gives it genre hybridity and sets it apart from other inscriptions on stećci.

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