The nature(s) of syntactic variation: Evidence from the Serbian/Croatian dialect continuum

The paper reports on a study of the variation inside the Serbo-Croatian dialect
continuum with respect to clitic placement, complements of modal verbs (infini-
tive/da+present) and the use of trebati ‘need’ as either an experiencer verb or a
simple transitive. Region and ethnicity accounted for a large portion of variation
in the use of infinitives and da+present with many speakers using these structures
interchangeably. Next, we found that clitics are almost uniformly placed after the
first phrase. The variation in the use of lexical trebati was confined to the Croatian
portion of the sample. Our findings suggest that (i) infinitives and da+present after
modal verbs should be treated as roughly the same syntactic structure; (ii) varia-
tion in clitic placement should not be analyzed as an instance of sociolinguistic
variation and deeper (linguistic) causes of variation should be pursued; (iii) trebati
as a transitive verb appears in the Croatian variety only.