Orphan Secondary Imperfectives in Croatian

Sa？etak The paper deals with the phenomenon of orphan secondary imperfectives in the Croatian language. Orphan imperfectives are secondary imperfectives that are either semantically different from their perfective partner or whose perfective partner is unattested in contemporary Croatian. These two types of orphan secondary imperfectives can be further divided into three subtypes. This study is the first account of this phenomenon in Croatian. The proposed classification is based on an analysis of some 60 Croatian verbs that were extracted from dictionaries of contemporary language as well as dictionaries of older language. The complexity of the phenomenon is underscored in the paper and the need for further research into the phenomenon is addressed. Finally, the paper demonstrates that orphan secondary imperfectives are not dealt with in a satisfactory manner in dictionaries of contemporary Croatian, and more attention ought to be paid to this phenomenon in lexicography