Open Access

Valentin Gešev

• The paper considers the interdependence between word order, congruence and formal cases – the means which, together with lexical meaning and formal class markers, explicate the concrete syntactic relations in a sentence. There are languages (including the Slavic ones) in whose structure congruence is very important. They may or may not possess formal cases. Even if they have no formal cases their word order is relatively free due to the compensatory role of congruence, which is often, but not always, able to eliminate potential ambiguity in the sentence, assisted to a certain extent by animacy, definiteness, pronoun duplicates of the objects and extra-linguistic knowledge (and Modern Bulgarian is good enough to illustrate this). At the same time, even in congruence languages with formal cases there are strict word order rules. In both kinds of congruence languages the violation of these rules can make a sentence utterly unintelligible (the last is exemplified by a couple of lines from Spanish and Ukrainian poetry).
• U članku se razmatra međuovisnost reda riječi, sročnosti i formalnih padeža, sredstava kojima se, zajedno s leksičkim značenjem i formalnim označivačima vrsta, objašnjavaju sintaktički odnosi u rečenici. Postoje jezici (uključujući slavenske) u čijoj je strukturi sročnost vrlo važna. Iako nemaju formalnih padeža, red riječi u tim jezicima relativno je slobodan zbog nadoknađujuće uloge sročnosti, koja često, ali ne uvijek, može eliminirati potencijalnu dvoznačnost u rečenici (suvremeni bugarski ilustrira to dovoljno dobro). U isto vrijeme čak i u sročnosnim jezicima s formalnim padežima postoje stroga pravila reda riječi. U objema vrstama sročnosnih jezika kršenje tih pravila može uzrokovati potpunu nerazumljivost rečenice (što se pokazuje s nekoliko primjera iz španjolske i ukrajinske poezije).