On Inflected Clitics in the Slovene Dialect of Resia in Friuli: Synchronic and Diachronic Aspects

Abstract

Examining clitic clusters of inflected clitics in the Slovene dialect of Resia from the historical linguistic point of view, one cannot but notice that, compared to the early post-Proto-Slavic state of affairs, the system of inflected clitics in Resian has undergone radical transformation. In fact, in the linguistic history of the Slovene dialect in question not only has the number of clitics increased, but their position in the sentence and their order in the clitic cluster has also undergone significant change that saw a secondary split into two distinct clitic clusters. As far as the system of inflected clitics in Resian is concerned, their number was augmented by the creation of new nominative forms of clitic personal pronouns as well as new auxiliary verbs and verbs that are prone to cliticisation. As far as the position of the inflected clitics in the main clause is concerned Resian no longer observes Wackernagel’s Law. The inflected clitics tend to occupy the so-called adverbal position, i.e., before or after a full lexical verb or before an auxiliary (if one occurs). This means that the clitic can appear in initial position as well. In addition to that, inflected clitics can be organised into two distinct clitic clusters, i.e., a ‘verbal’ and a pronominal one. While the rise of nominative clitic forms of personal pronouns, loss of Wackernagel’s Law, the tendency of inflected clitics to occupy the adverbal position, and subsequent split of the original clitic cluster into a ‘verbal’ and a pronominal part in Resian are most likely to be due to the linguistic influence of the neighbouring Romance linguistic varieties, primarily Friulian, the “rearrangement” of inflected clitics in the clitic cluster itself most probably reflects a well-established tendency of clitic climbing of verbal clitics to the position before pronominal clitics – a phenomenon characteristic of the wider Slovene linguistic area. In dialects of Slovene, as is well known, verbal clitics, which in the early post-Proto-Slavic period of the formation of individual Slavic languages were placed after pronominal clitics in a cluster of inflectional clitics, tend to move from their original position at the end of the cluster towards the beginning of the cluster, i.e., they tend to precede pronominal clitics. However, the original word order is preserved in negative sentences, where due to the contraction of the negative particle *ne ‘not’ and the auxiliary in the result was a creation of new accented contracted forms. While the central Slovene dialects and, consequently, Standard Slovene reflect an intermediate stage in the process of verbal clitic climbing, Resian displays a stage in which the latter have already completely moved to the position preceding the oblique case forms of pronominal clitics.