VARIETY-BASED TOPOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS OF THE SLOVENIAN PARTICLE PA

Abstract

The Slovenian particle (and conjunction) pa is one of the most frequent lexemes of the Slovenian language. As it can express additive and contrastive relations and also has the function of a focus and modal particle, it can be considered as semantically highly underspecified. In the Slovenian sentence where the clitic sequence occupies the second position, pa can occur in a variety of positions (P), including before P1, P1 itself, the position between P1 and the clitic sequence, the position after the clitic sequence and rarely the position after the second part of the verb (participle) in the composed tenses. Sometimes pa also occurs in the middle of the clitic sequence. It was assumed that the positions pa can occupy might be governed by restrictions related to the spoken or written nature of a given text. On the basis of a comparison of a corpus of transcribed interviews of a highly personal and emotional nature, on the one hand, and a corpus of rather formal journalistic texts on the other hand, the present article shows that the distribution of pa indeed differs in the two corpora. With the exception of quotations from spoken language, in the journalistic texts pa does not occur at the end of a clitic sequence.