Prosodic Correlates of the Grammaticalization Scale: A Case Study of the Serbian Lexical, Modal, and Auxiliary Uses of Hteti (‘Want’)

In Serbian dialects that allow the variation between infinitival and so-called ‘da+present’ complements (DPC) (e.g. those of Vojvodina), the verb hteti (Eng. to want) allows for three different kinds of complements, corresponding to its three different uses. In its lexical use, it takes an NP complement; the volitional modal version combines with DPC; and the future auxiliary takes the infinitival complement. Assuming different syntactic structures for all three types of complements, we hypothesize that they exhibit different prosodic features. The hypothesis was tested experimentally by analysing the preboundary lengthening and the behaviour of F0 as signals of different prosodic constituency reflected in the Prosodic Hierarchy (PH). It was predicted that higher units of PH will show higher degree of preboundary lengthening, as well as that the presence of phrase accents and boundary tones will mark the right edge of PhPs and IPs respectively. We recorded 10 students at the University of Novi Sad as they pronounced 10 sentences per each of the three uses of this verb. The data partially confirms our hypothesis, as the modal verb hteti (Eng. to want) followed by DPC lengthens more than the auxiliary and lexical verb hteti (Eng. to want), which are followed by an infinitival and NP complement respectively. In contrast, the F0 contour remains unaffected by these differences, and phrase accents are not identified in any of the uses of the verb hteti (Eng. to want).