WITH OR WITHOUT THE SAME CASE: CATALIPSIS OF THE PREPOSITIONAL COMPLEMENT IN COORDINATE CONSTRUCTIONS IN CROATIAN

The paper investigates coordinate constructions with the catalipsis of prepositional complement (CPC) in Croatian, as in na ili oko kapka ‘on or around the eyelid’. The main research question is what licences a CPC. An examination of the normative and descriptive literature on the CPC in Croatian informed by the theory of catalipsis on the right periphery of the first coordinand, known as right node raising in the generative tradition, has generated more focused research questions – whether licensors of the CPC in Croatian are: 1) matching case forms of the elided and the non-elided NP, 2) multisyllabicity or lexical stressability of the prepositions, and 3) semantic contrast between the prepositions. These questions were addressed through an analysis of a manually annotated sample of 1026 examples of constructions with CPC from the Croatian National Corpus and 1001 examples from the Croatian Web Corpus. The results of the investigation suggest that matching case forms are not a conditioning factor for the CPC in contemporary Croatian language use, contrary to normative suggestions, and that the main licensor for the CPC is semantic contrastivity between the prepositions. It has been shown that the number of syllables or alleged lexical stressability of the prepositions are not necessary conditions for the possibility of use in a CPC construction, but these features do seem to correlate with the frequency of particular prepositions in such use. However, this aspect requires further research before reliable conclusions.