CROATIAN DISTRIBUTIVE VERBS

Sa？etak Distributive verbs in Croatian form a special group of verbs which distinguishes itself by a specific syntactic feature which is semantically conditioned by their verbal content being distributed to more participants. When more than one participant is denoted, it is not a noun in singular that is mostly used. For that reason the subjects and objects which appear with such distributive verbs can not be expressed by a noun in singular, but only by a substantive in plural, for example Ro？aci su mu poumirali, but not Ro？ak mu je poumirao, Po？enio je sinove i poudao k？eri, but not Po？enio je sina i poudao k？er, Snopovi su poispadali, but not Snop je poispadao. Collective nouns are an exception to that. Since their singular form expresses the plurality, with distributive verbs they can be in singular as both subjects and objects. The examples are: Narod se porazbolijevao, Li？？e je pootpadalo, Rasprodao je imetak, zemlju, djedovinu, obiteljsko srebro, but not Rasprodao je ku？u, as it could be Rasprodao je ku？e. From the aforementionet, it follows that the distributive verb can serve as a reliable test to identify and split collective nouns from uncollective ones. This test enables us to include in this group many nouns that have not been included in this group until now. The author critically reviews the description of distributive verbs in grammars and reference books. Special attention is given to the semantic demarcation of distributive verbs from some other verbal groups with which they may, in certain grammatical contexts, be either morphologically identical or may overlap with them