DATIV I LOKATIV U ADMINISTRATIVNOM I KNJIŽEVNOUMJETNIČKOM FUNKCIONALNOM STILU
DATIVE AND LOCATIVE IN ADMINISTRATIVE AND LITERARY FUNCTIONAL STYLE

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the syntactic positions, functions and meanings of the dative and locative cases in two functional styles of Bosnian: the administrative style and the literary style. The analysis is based on a corpus consisting of an administrative text (Law on Primary Schooling, Official Gazette of Zenica-Doboj Canton, 2018) and a literary text (Meša Selimović, Magla i mjesečina, 1986). The aim is to describe how the dative and locative appear in adnominal, adverbal and other positions, what functions they fulfil (non-congruent attribute, object, adverbial modifier, subject, nominal predicate), and which semantic values they typically express (possession, benefit, harm, purpose, spatial reference, temporal reference, manner, psychological state). The findings show that in the administrative functional style the use of the dative and the locative is highly standardised, formally constrained and oriented towards institutional precision. The locative predominantly occurs in prepositional phrases with concrete spatial and temporal meanings, while the dative typically marks purpose, obligation, competence or entitlement. In the literary style, however, the dative frequently carries expressive or emotional value (possessive dative, ethical dative, dative of psychological state), and the locative contributes to atmospheric, symbolic and figurative meaning. The analysis shows that functional style conditions the distribution and interpretive load of case forms, and it demonstrates a contrast between stylistic rigidity and referential explicitness in administrative discourse, and syntactic semantic flexibility in literary discourse.

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