On the noun-like character of Croatian possessive adjectives

Abstract

The well-known typological feature of Slavic possessive adjectives is their ability to control personal pronouns, relative pronouns, even modifiers, i.e. their noun-like behaviour. In Slavic languages, this feature is developed to a different extent, e.g. in Sorbian to a greater, in Croatian to a lesser extent. The paper is a follow-up of previous research and puts forth new data on the possibility of Croatian possessive adjectives to control pronouns. The data is based on a corpus of recently gathered examples from contemporary texts and on a more detailed analysis of tokens gathered from online corpora, dating from the 1850s to the 2010s. It is shown to what extent the noun-like character of Croatian adjectives can be established, in which type of texts it occurs, as well as which are its consequences on the understanding of adjectives as a word class.