COSUBORDINATION IN CROATIAN

Apart from coordination and subordination, Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin 2005: 183-198) introduces cosubordination as the third type of syntactic relation. A co-subordinated constituent is not a part of another, higher constituent (as in subordination), but it is neither completely independent: rather, it has to be in the scope of an operator (e.g., aspect, tense, mood, negation or illocutionary force) in the syntactic structure it is co-subordinated with. This paper examines several Croatian constructions and shows that they should be treated as instances of cosubordination. Such constructions include sentences connected by connectives such as i ‘and’ with equi-NP deletion and omitted auxiliary verbs, as well (on the level of NP) nouns joined by the connective i that share a quantifier and/or a demonstrative pronoun. It is argued that, no matter whether one accepts the theoretical assumptions of Role and Reference Grammar or not, any descriptively adequate grammar of Croatian has to acknowledge the structural peculiarities of these constructions.