The Use, Meaning and Functions of Slovene Bare Pronouns

The paper presents selected aspects of the use and meaning of Slovene bare pronouns. An extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of concordances from the reference corpus Gigafida 2.0 allows for a new, more accurate classification of these pronouns in terms of their indefinite pronoun functions (Haspelmath 1997), as well as their categorization as epistemic indefinite pronouns and Negative Polarity Items. Furthermore, the corpus data show that the placement of bare pronouns in a clause is predictable, typically depending on the complexity of the pronominal phrase and the speaker’s communicative intentions.