The pronoun sto and its semantic and syntactic derivatives in the vernacular of the Sirinic county

Abstract

This paper analyzes the pronoun sto and its semantic and syntactic derivatives in the Prizren - South Morava dialect in the Sirinic county (Sirinicka Zupa), in the northern part of the Sar Mountains. The paper focuses primarily on the syntactic use of sto, while its semantic derivatives are outlined mainly in terms of references to the previous research on the subject. The dialect corpus shows that this lexeme has a wide range of syntactic realizations - it can be used as a relativizer in defining and non-defining relative clauses, as a conjunction in the clauses of reason and declarative clauses, and it can also be used as a pronoun and adverb. Moreover, the research includes the cases in which sto was found to be a part of multi-word conjunctions in hypotactic or paratactic structures. This paper primarily aims to determine and examine the syntactic positions in which sto is realized and the environment in which it is used. In the majority of the observed cases, there were also other corresponding syntactic devices, so that the focus was also placed on determining the frequency of the lexeme sto in these positions in relation to its synonymous syntactic counterparts. The fact that the form sto is widely used in the Sirinic vernacular as a conjunction in relative clauses points to its provenance in a wider Serbian-Macedonian area as well as to its not being included in the standard Serbian language, in lieu of which the form koji is predominantly used. In the vernacular of Sirinic county, the lexeme sto is used as a conjunction in declarative object clauses, and it is also the principal conjunction in the clauses of reason.