Great Dissension in the Description of Minor Parts of Speech – Prepositions and Adverbs in Croatian Normative Literature

Sažetak

In this paper, the authors compare the lack of uniformities in the descriptions of prepositions and adverbs in the present-day Croatian normative literature and determine what caused the dis­sension. Special attention is paid to the mutual relation between adverbs and prepositions, i.e. to the discerning of these two par­ts of speech. Dissension of normative descriptions is observed in particular in the dictionary definitions of the parts of speech of prepositionalized instrumentals that are determined either as adverbs or as prepositions, or not mentioned in a separate en­try. There is also a comparison of grammatical and lexicograp­hical descriptions of the words prije, poslije, blizu, bliže, niže, više, oko i okolo which, depending on the sentence context, can belong to two parts of speech – adverbs and prepositions. The paper suggests that the determination of the appurtenance of a particular word to one of the groups of minor parts of speech requires various criteria to be taken into account.