Jezični sustav i kulturni kontekst u Sintaksi Radoslava Katičića
Some Remarks on the Syntax of Standard Croatian by Radoslav Katičić

Summary/Abstract: Katičić's Syntax is based on a representative corpus selected from the Croatian literary text, the humanities and journalism. lt widens the usual basis of description by including, along with the corpus of Karadžić's school, specimens from the Croatian literature based on the neo-štokavian dialect between the 1sth century and now. Thus it produces a broader range of linguistic phenomena, which need a broader and more precise linguistic model of interpretation than has been produced so far. On the other hand however, it does not review the syntactic facts from all variant idioms of standard Croatian. This is because a necessary preliminary work like this one has no precedent, and any such attempt is necessarily provisory, being more selective and prescriptive than interpretative and descriptive. The corpus is interpreted by a very coherent deductive system of grammatical rules. It is not formalized symbolically and does not reject traditional grammatical notions, but it succeeds surprisingly in building up a system of phrase structure rules (with precise sub categorization of nominal and verbal forms in their syntactic roles), of transformations of phrases into complex sentences with clause structures, and of transformations into complex sentences with non-clause structures, which result from the processes of attribution, nominalization, infinitivization, etc. The whole system is viewed under three aspects of grammatical semantic and informative sentence structures. Their interplay aptly explains many syntactic phenomena. Thus, it permits an elegant explanation of fundamental rules of word order, or allows very precise and complex semantic interpretations of syntactic structures. In the review article, this theoretical system is presented, its specific issues and accomplishments are exemplified, some technical objections are put forward, basic parallels with the generative grammar are discussed. Finally, some generalizations of the model are proposed, which nevertheless indirectly bear witness to its fruitfulness.

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