In his 1584 grammar Arcticae horulae Succisivae (Free Winter Hours), Adam Bohorič dealt comprehensively with the problems of Slovene syntax, incorporating also a variety of examples from spoken Slovene. The overall treatment of Slovene syntax in Latin as a metalanguage is based on comparison with the syntax of Latin and German. When commenting on a given linguistic phenomenon, he did not move beyond Slovene-Latin normative comparisons on an expressive level. The relation between sense and structural-syntactic (particularly phrasal) valency was expressed only indirectly through comparative cross-linguistic descriptions; when discussing the use of cases, he could not overlook the importance of verbal meaning alongside semantic-syntactic verb valency, knowing that a certain verbal meaning can only be expressed by a particular case. Despite the dominance of phrasal syntax and valency discussed in his work, core verbal derivations forced him into a simultaneous treatment also of transformational clausal syntax. His treatment of clausal valency was thus not surpassed until as late as the beginning of the 19th century.
|
