Slaganje negacija u starosrpskom jeziku

Abstract

This paper explores the most important syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of the structures with negative concord in Old Serbian. The basic aims of the paper are the following: (a) to describe the state of the use of these constructions in Old Serbian in the 12th‒15th century; (b) to compare the results with the state in standard Serbian in order to determine the presence/absence of the syntactic change; (c) to compare the results with the state of other Slavic languages (especially Old Church Slavonic, Old Czech and Old Russian) in order to determine the Proto-Slavic situation and precisely define the chronology of the development in individual Slavic languages. The research revealed two types of structures with the negative concord in the Old Serbian corpus: (a) type NegQ + Neg V (negated universal quantifier with the absence of the predicate negation), found only in monastery charters, or more precisely in those parts of the charters that were written in Serbian Church Slavonic, represents a syntactic Grecism inherited from Old Church Slavonic and as such can be considered a feature of a higher style of the Serbian Church Slavonic language; (b) type NegQ + Neg V (negated universal quantifier and negated predicate), used in Serbian Church Slavonic contexts only in some exceptions, represents a syntactic pattern inherited from the ProtoSlavic language and can be considered a feature of a lower style in the Serbian Church Slavonic language of the charters that were investigated. The isolation of the type NegQ + Neg V only in the Serbian Church Slavonic parts of the monastery charters leads to the following conclusions: (a) the comparison of Old Serbian and contemporary standard Serbian indicates the absence of the syntactic change, i.e. a continuity in the development; consequently, (b) Old Serbian, just like standard Serbian, belongs to the type of languages with a consistent negative concord; and finally, (c) the previous two conclusions imply that the Proto-Slavic situation needs to be redefined, as well as the development of this linguistic feature in Slavic languages.