Ekstraponirana relativna rečenica u administrativno-pravnom stilu srpskoga jezika 19. veka

Abstract

The subject of this paper is the status of extrapolated relative clauses within the administrative and legal registers of the 19th century Serbian language. We analyzed examples of relative clauses from legislative texts introduced during the 19th century (Constitutions from 1835, 1838, 1869, 1888; The Serbian Civil Code from 1842; The Collection of Laws, Regulations and Decrees from 1840, 1845, 1847). The corpus consists of 1.280 relative clauses, from which 130 are extrapolated. This is a major divergence when compared to the corpus collected by Snježana Kordić. This situation can be explained due to the specific sentence structures in the 19th century, primarily the final position of verbs and the postposition of the attribute Such sentence structures can lead to problems with decoding the content of a sentence, because congruence is the only indicator of which relativizer is used. Additionally, this could serve as an introduction into more complex sentence structures, including the complex antecedent structure and its reduplication within the relative clause. We established that this status of relative clauses could point towards the presence of elements of unconfigured syntax in the pre-codification period.