This diploma thesis focuses on the differences between the possessive pronouns and reflexive possessive pronoun in the standard Slovenian language. The aim is to discover what possibilities there are to express the subject's possession with one type of possessive pronouns and the other. Linguists have always been defining and discussing possessive pronouns in grammars, and soon a rule was formed that the reflexive possessive pronoun expresses the subject's possession. The definition of the reflexive possessive pronoun by Jože Toporišič is similar to the definition of his predecessors and is the current basis and norm for the standard language. The reflexive possessive pronoun reflects the property of the subject; however, in some cases, as in the case of general property or general possession, it should be substituted with not reflexive possessive pronoun. I address the issue of whether the personal possessive pronouns in the standard Slovenian language could actually express the subject’s property, and whether that even is the subject’s possession. For that I used the examples cited by Toporišič and some older grammarians. The examples themselves in the grammars are written for the first-person plural that is why I will focus more on the options for expressing possession with possessive pronouns in this form. For the basis of this thesis I used older Slovenian grammars, the current Slovenian grammar from 2004 titled Slovenska slovnica by Jože Toporišič and Slovenian lexical semantics titled Slovensko leksikalno pomenoslovje by Ada Vidovič Muha in order to determine the semantic features of possessive pronouns and the differences between them. Moreover, I have also used the electronic Slovenian text corpus Gigafida to find more examples.
|