Silazno-uzlazna jezgra u sustavu jezgri hrvatskog jezika
The falling-rising nucleus in the nucleus system of the Croatian language

Summary/Abstract: After the nucleus is defined as an intonational (prosodic) sign, and after the claim that the nucleus is also a linguistic sign, an outline of the Croatian language nucleus system is proposed. The proposed description is then compared to two earlier descriptions of Croatian nuclei, and with the nuclei of the English language. More is said about the falling-rising nucleus, which is frequent in public speaking in Croatian, but has been considered as one of the differences between Croatian and English - in Croatian allegedly nonexistent, but typical for English. Conclusions: the falling-rising nucleus in Croatian is imported from West-European languages, mainly from English and Italian. This is the source of its (mainly stylistic-rhetorical) meanings, which are different from the meanings the form has in languages it comes from. The differences in meanings point to the presence of typically linguistic feature of convention, which the author considers to be an argument for the claim that nuclei are linguistic signs and that thay should find their place in the description of a language.

• Details
• Contents