Overt, Omitted and Cliticized Structural Arguments in Preschool Speakers of Serbian Dialectal Varieties
Abstract
The paper explores two hypotheses: that the acquisition of clitics in Serbo-Croatian includes a stage in which children generalize pro as the uninflected clitic pronoun for both subjects and direct objects, before acquiring the inflection for the object clitic, and that the acquisition of object clitics in the standard variety is facilitated by a higher degree of grammaticalization of these clitics, and consequently also a higher frequency. Results of an investigation with picture-based narratives are reported and discussed, in which the predictions of these two hypotheses are quantitatively tested and confirmed.
Submitted: Dec. 30, 2025 | Accepted: Jan. 31, 2026 | Published March 31, 2026 | Language: en
Keywords Bilingualism • Repetition • Clitics • Structural arguments • Omission • Geographic variation • Language development
Copyright © 2025 Boban Arsenijević. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/BES/2785-3187/2025/01/004