Subject position in English, Portuguese and Croatian

Miščin, Sara. (2015). Subject position in English, Portuguese and Croatian. Diploma Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of English Language and Literature. [mentor Zovko Dinković, Irena].

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Abstract

In this thesis we present the theory behind the position of the subject in Portuguese, English and Croatian since those languages, despite all being SVO languages, have certain differences concerning the position of the subject in a sentence. Portuguese and Croatian are the so-called null-subject languages, while English is a non-null-subject language. However, Croatian, being an inflective language, has a relatively free word order while Portuguese has restrictions. We also present two studies, a corpus and a questionnaire one. The corpus study was done in order to see whether the rules given by the linguists apply to the written usage found in the Corpus of the Portuguese language. The questionnaire study was conducted with 65 native speakers of Portuguese in order to see whether the theory and corpus results presented overlap with the real-life usage of Portuguese. The results of both the corpus and the questionnaire study showed that Portuguese is a SVO language despite some verbs having tendencies towards a different word order.

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