A note on oblique case 119
- Oblique case, indeclinable nominals, and a Case Realization Condition
2.1 Undeclined nominals
In Serbian/Croatian, case morphology is obligatory on declinable words, but the lan-
guage has certain lexical items, such as some loan words and quantifiers, that are
special in that they cannot be declined. As observed in earlier literature, e.g. Wechsler
& Zlatić (2001) (henceforth W&Z), the language requires the overt morphological
manifestation of oblique case marking. Common nouns as well as proper names in
Serbian/Croatian are generally inflected for case and number features, and within the
noun phrase, all of the noun’s dependents (such as determiners, possessives, adjec-
tives) morphologically realize the features of case, number, and gender in agreement
with the features of the head noun (see e.g. (1), and the singular case paradigm of
the traditional 2nd declension class (2) for the proper name Marija (from W&Z’s
2001 : 545)).
(1) moja stara knjiga
my.sg.nom.f old.sg.nom.f book.sg.nom.f
‘my old book’
(2) Singular
Nominative: Marij-a
Genitive: Marij-e
Dative/Locative: Marij-i
Instrumental: Marij-om
Vocative: Marij-o/-a
However, female names such as those in (3) (W&Z(8)), and also the borrowed com-
mon noun lejdi ‘lady’, that have endings other than /-a/ are normally undeclined in the
language.
(3) Some undeclined female names:
Miki, Keti, Meri, Džejn, Džin, Ines, Nives,...
Feminine nouns normally end in /-a/ in the citation form, but some loan words such
as the female names above have an exceptional phonological shape, and due to this are
generally not declinable.
A further class of words that are undeclined, and turn out to behave in a manner
parallel to the indeclinable female names referred to above, are certain quantifiers
and numerals. Thus, for instance the quantifier mnogo (4a) or the numeral pet ‘five’
(4b) do not inflect for case or person, number and gender features. As observed by
W&Z, quantified NPs (QNPs) in Serbian/Croatian headed by indeclinable quanti-
fiers such as mnogo ‘many/much’, malo ‘few/little’ and the numerals pet ‘five’ and