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This introductory chapter discusses the goals and methodology of the book. The study addresses specific controversies surrounding the codifications of the four successor languages to Serbo-Croatian: Serbian, Montenegrin, Croatian, and Bosnian. The analysis is based on close readings of the recently published works on each of the successor languages. The types of consulted works can be categorized as instruments of codification; articles and monographs by linguists from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia discussing specific linguistic concerns; blueprints for the new successor languages, or reinterpreting the years of the unified language; and articles from the popular press on language issues. The chapter also explains language as a marker of ethnic identity and language in the context of Balkan nationalism. Furthermore, the chapter expounds on Serbo-Croatian as a dying tongue.

This chapter discusses the precarious Serbo-Croatian language union. It describes models for unified languages, including centrally monitored unity, government-imposed unity, and pluricentric unity. Controversies connected with Serb/Croat language accords such as The Literary Agreement of 1850 and The Novi Sad Agreement of 1954 are explained. The following issues regarding the power of competing dialects are shown: Stokavian dialects and ethnicity, ownership and citizenship dilemmas of dialects, and standard pronunciations variants, or idioms. Multiple alphabets, writing systems, and spelling rules further aggravate problems. Vocabulary could be a reflection of divergent approaches to identity, as exemplified by Croatian purism, the supremacy of the vernacular for the Serbs, and divergent attitudes towards foreign borrowings. The chapter also follows the turbulent history of the language union.

This chapter discusses developments since 2004, including scholarly attitudes towards the new language realities in ex-Yugoslavia, a round table controversy in Croatia, two new dictionaries in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the pains of language separation in Montenegro, and recent perspectives in Serbia. Updates on corpus and status planning issues affecting the development of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian languages are provided. The most recent publications and scholarly efforts defining similarities and differences among the languages that used to be subsumed under 'Serbo-Croatian’ are explained. The chapter ends with the book's final observations and suggestions for future research.

This chapter presents an overview of intonation of Standard Serbo-Croatian with a proposal for prosodic transcription within the ToBI family of prosodic transcription models. The intonation model includes broad and narrow focus utterances of declarative statements and questions, and vocative chant. The transcription model includes a representation of the lexical pitch accents (short and long falling and short and long rising), phrase accents, boundary tones, break indices, words, and glosses.

This chapter discusses two cases of violation repair under sluicing in Serbo-Croatian (SC). One case concerns preposition stranding (P-stranding). It is shown that SC allows P-stranding under sluicing, even though it does not allow it under wh-movement without sluicing. SC initially seems to be a counterexample to Merchant’s (2001) generalization that a language which does not normally allow P-stranding should not allow it under sluicing. The chapter shows that the loss of preposition under sluicing in SC is however not conditioned by P-stranding, and so does not instantiate a counter-example to Merchant’s generalization. The chapter also examines the repair of Inverse Case Filter violations in SC, in which numeral NPs with a numeral quantifier assigning a genitive of quantification are acceptable in sluicing constructions, but not in parallel non-sluiced contexts. Such patterns are argued to lead to new conclusions concerning the morphological realization of inherent case at PF.

This chapter examines the epic decasyllable, a traditional South Slavic folk metrical form, with an emphasis on the so-called Serbo-Croatian poems. In particular, it analyzes the five volumes of Serbian epic poetry collected and published by Vuk Karadžić between 1814 and 1847. The chapter argues that the epic decasyllable is a periodic, trochaic meter and that the prosodic indicators of its trochaic organization include the prosodic word. Drawing on Kristin Hanson and Paul Kiparsky's (1996) paramaterized account of possible metrical forms, it examines the structural properties of the epic decasyllable and proposes a formal account of its metrical organization. The chapter also discusses the place of function words in the verse and describes the interactions among metrical properties that characterize the metrical form using Optimality Theory.

This chapter presents a brief overview of the unusual life story of a language bearing many names but internationally best known as Serbo-Croatian. Its course is traced from its construction at the turn of the twentieth century, through its deconstruction some ninety years later, to its eventual reconstruction as several national official languages (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin) following the Yugoslav wars of succession. The different meanings of the term “Serbo-Croatian” are noted, along with some of the resultant confusion and manipulation. It is concluded that although the four idioms are now legally and politically independent entities, and despite the effects of some divergent trends, in linguistic and communicational terms it still makes sense to see Serbo-Croatian as a single polycentric standard

This chapter describes a theory of phonology that employs ordered rules and illustrates how it accounts for certain complex phenomena central to the phonologies of three Slavic languages: Russian, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian. It considers three important principles of phonological rule application, assumes that such application is preceded by morphological structure building, and argues that all Slavic nouns have the tripartite form Root + Theme + Case-Number. The chapter also looks at the genitive plural form of nouns in the Slavic languages.

The chapter investigates the Evaluative Dative Reflexive (EDR), a phenomenon attested in a number of languages and described under different names (coreferential dative in Berman 1982, reflexive dative in Borer 2005, personal dative in Horn 2008), as it appears in the southeastern dialects of Serbo-Croatian (SESC). A set of data is presented illustrating that EDR matches its cross-linguistic relatives, and also showing some of the properties either particular to EDR in SESC, or not yet observed in other languages. An analysis is proposed, presenting the EDR as a restrictor of the subject of evaluation in the clause, identifying it with the actual subject of the clause. It is proposed that EDR is syntactically placed in the head of the evaluative mood projection (Mood⁰ _evaluative), where it systematically gets bound by the subject of the clause, that is, the specifier of the tense or topic projection, depending on the analysis assumed. The discussion concludes with a presentation of how each of the empirically observed semantic and syntactic properties of EDR derives from the proposed analysis.

This chapter analyses a set of interface phenomena showing important correlations between certain phonological regularities on the one hand, and a set of syntactic and semantic properties of the respective expressions on the other. Serbo-Croatian deadjectival nominalizations typically exhibit one of two different prosodic patterns: (1) prosody faithful to the base i.e., surface prosody of the lexical adjective (e.g., Ispraavnoost ‘correctness’, derived from Ispraavan ‘correct’); and (2) a rising span over a long closed penultimate syllable and the syllable following it (e.g., isprAAvnOOst ‘correctness’). The chapter formulates a generalization where, all things being equal, nominalized predicational structures correspond to (1), while nominalized stems correspond to (2). It provides a formal model of the syntactic and semantic as well as the phonological reality of these nominalizations, and an attempt at explaining these facts.

So far, I have examined children’s spellings at the level of whole words. The results show that children have more difficulty with some kinds of words than others. For example, children often misspell words that contain multiple-letter graphemes, words such as that and sang. Children often misspell irregular words, words such as said and come. One would guess that th is the trouble spot in that and ai is the trouble spot in said. However, because the analyses presented so far are confined to whole words, I cannot say for sure. To determine which parts of words are difficult to spell, I must move from the level of whole words to the level of individual phonemes and individual graphemes. The need to examine children’s spellings at the level of phonemes and graphemes stems from the nature of the English writing system itself. As discussed in Chapter 1, the English writing system is basically alphabetic. Although most phonemes may be spelled in more than one way, there are relations between phonemes and graphemes. For instance, /k/ may be spelled with k, as in key, c, as in care, or ck, as in back, among other possibilities. Adults cannot always choose the correct spelling from among these possibilities, but we know that /k/ could never be written with m or b. Our knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences tells us that Carl or Karl are reasonable renditions of the spoken form /k’arl/ but that Marl is not. Traditionally, it was thought that children learn to spell on a visual basis, by memorizing the sequence of letters in each word. In this view, children treat printed words as wholes. They do not learn relations between the parts of printed words (graphemes) and the parts of spoken words (phonemes). The traditional view further implies that children memorize one word at a time. They do not learn relations between sounds and spellings that apply to many different words. Findings reported in Chapter 2 suggest that this traditional view of learning to spell is incorrect For example, children’s difficulty on irregular words like said and come suggests that children learn about the correspondences between phonemes and graphemes.

Simone de Beauvoir’s famous dictum (“One is not born, but rather becomes, woman”) and The Second Sex appeared in Serbo-Croatian translation (Drugi pol translated by Zorica Milosavljević and Mirjana Vukmirović) in 1982 in Yugoslavia. Socialist Yugoslavia and Yugoslav feminists at the time were an important exception to the trends and ideologies of both the Cold War East and West. In Yugoslav socialism, the meaning of “woman” was shaped by the Yugoslav government’s pursuit of the “women’s emancipation” project assigning women the triple role of mother, worker, and comrade. Despite this socialist project, Beauvoir’s Drugi pol was welcomed by Yugoslav feminists who denounced the continued patriarchal treatment of women under Yugoslav socialism. For these Yugoslav feminists, Beauvoir’s writing exposed the social construction of “nature” as the foundation for women’s subordination. The shifting meaning of “woman” and renewed women’s subordination in a post-socialist society only served to confirm the continued relevance of Beauvoir’s dictum.