A hidden morphosyntactical scheme within sentence modality

Abstract

The article describes a morphosyntactical mini-system of anaphoras and deictics which - alongside the traditional paradigm of interrogatives with which we identify syntactical functions within the sentence: who? whom? to whom? concerning whom? with whom? when? how? how much? where? and why? - includes forms which answer the question in an indefinite, negative and affirmative manner, for example, in Croatian: tko? - netko, nitko, taj; kada? - nekada, nikada, tada etc. It is established in the article that these answers cover most of the fields of the basic sentence modalities (excepting the imperative which has its direct morphosyntactical expression in the verbal imperative mode and the exclamatory which does not have systematized expressive means). With their regular constructions they make up a kind of hidden morphosyntactical scheme of sentence modalities. The author analyses the mini-systems of three different languages: Croatian, Latin and German. Latin and German possess logically constructed mini-systems with very little uncovered places but with a bit less of regularity than in Croatian: for example, Latin quis? - aliquis, nemo, is; German wer? - jemand, niemand, d(ies)er. In a footnote the author gives examples from Czech which has a coherently structured mini-system like Croatian. The author considers as the most interesting the forms for the "indefinite": Croatian netko, nešto, nekada, nekako, nekoliko; Latin aliquis, aliquid, aliquando, aliquo modo, aliquot, alicubi; German jemand, etwas, irgendwann, irgendwie, irgendwo. These forms do not have a corresponding sentence modality but, syntactically speaking, they are similar to the "affirmative".