Serbo-Croatian Enclitics for English-Speaking Learners * (Archive‪)‬

Certain Serbo-Croatian personal pronouns, particles, and verb forms are always unaccented and follow different word-order rules than other words in the sentence do. They cannot stand by themselves but always require a preceding accented word to lean or "incline" on: hence their name "enclitics". There is not just one rule governing their use in sentences, but several rules which form a system. Violating any one of the rules can give an incorrect SC sentence, so that they all have to be mastered by the learner of SC. Unfortunately, every presentation of the rules so far in SC grammars and textbooks has been incomplete or even wrong. (1) This paper is an attempt to fill the gap. We can expect the enclitics to be more difficult for English-speaking students than, say, for French-speakers, because (unlike French, Spanish, and many other languages) English has nothing really corresponding to the unaccented enclitic forms with their special rules. English does have special unaccented forms of pronouns, verbs, and the particle not (written as contractions: I'd, he'll, "didja", can't), but there are not separate rules for placing these forms in the sentence the way there are in SC. Another difference is that English contracted forms are used mainly in conversational style, while SC enclitics must be used in all styles, both spoken and written, conversational and formal.