Syntactic characteristics of pronouns in Marulić’s and Kašić’s translation of De imitatione Christi

The paper analyzes the influence of Latin syntax on the usage of pronouns in Marulić’s and Kašić’s translation of the very popular medieval work De imitatione Christi. The following characteristics of pronouns are analyzed: expressing possessivity with the genitive case of the 3rd person singular personal pronouns, usage of the 1st and 2nd person possessive pronoun instead of the reflexive-possessive pronoun svoj, usage of the reflexive-possessive pronoun svoj instead of the 3rd person possessive pronoun, usage of the 1st and 2nd person personal pronoun instead of a reflexive pronoun, usage of relative pronouns at the beginning of sentences, and usage of the plural of neutral demonstrative and indefinite (sav, svaki) pronouns as well as of a neutral relative pronoun (koji) instead of a singular one. The analysis of the two translations of the same Latin text, although they refer only to a small and limited segment, indicates that there were two parallel trends in the development of a literary language. One is connected to the liturgical literary genre, mostly translational, and to its immanent usage norms according to which syntactic calques from Latin became a recognizable model confirmed even in non-translated literary texts. In Marulić’s translations one can discern the characteristics of a literary language that are not the result of the influence of a foreign language but rather are indicators of original Croatian language heritage. The differences found should be viewed in the context of the extralinguistic circumstances in which the texts were produced – Jesuit Bartol Kašić, as the author of the almost century-and-a-half younger translation, was limited at all language levels by the authority of the Latin original, while humanist and writer Marko Marulić, without deviating significantly from the original, often gave priority to the expressive possibilities of the Croatian language that were a result of author’s primary feeling and knowledge of the language