On determiners in Croatian from the perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar

Abstract: In most of the existing grammars of the Croatian language words are directly analyzed into clauses (or sentences), and therefore the sentence is taken as the main syntactic unit. Consequently, these grammars, with rare exceptions (for example, Silić and Pranjković 2007; Belaj and Tanacković Faletar 2014), almost completely ignore the syntax of groups (phrases) and their parts, as well as the syntax of clauses and the syntax of discourse. Also, the lack of description based on a particular theoretical approach results in the mixing of grammatical levels and inconsistent terminology. Based on the study of various contemporary approaches to the interpretation of nominal groups, we support the view that the term ‘attribute’ has been inadequately used in more traditional approaches to Croatian grammar, and emphasize the need to distinguish modifiers from determiners. Furthermore, this paper tries to provide a simple model of description of nominal groups, with particular reference to the concept of determiner, within the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday 1985, 1994; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004; Fawcett 2010) as an approach that sees language as a social category and analyzes its use in actual communication.