Slovene and the South Slavic Language Family – the Obligation of Expressing Duality and Other Stories from the South

Slovene is one of the rare languages exhibiting the category of the dual grammatical number, and the only Indo-European one among the official languages of European Union (the other being Maltese from the Semitic family). Being a morphologically rich language, which is a common characteristic of Slavic languages, this unique feature contributes no less than 613 tags to the tagset of 1,902 possible combinations commonly used for PoS-tagging of Slovene (Erjavec and Krek 2008). In the tagset, the dual can be attributed to verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives and numerals. In the standard variant of the language Slovene speakers are obliged to use the dual in all cases where two objects, people or other entities are referred to. They are, therefore, confronted both with possibilities and obligations that are not available to speakers of other languages. We will explore some of the more interesting ones.