Serbian Nominal Groups: System and Structure

Abstract

This paper presents a study on nominal groups in Serbian grounded in systemic functional grammar (SFG). Its aim is to complement traditional and formal descriptions of nominal group structures in Serbian and contribute to growing SFG research on nominal groups across languages. Adopting a top-down approach to investigating the relationship between systems and structures, this study uses registerial variables (field and mode) and discourse semantic systems (ideation and identification) as points of departure. The study’s data has been extracted from a focus text published by Radio Television Serbia (RTS), complemented by examples from the Corpus of Contemporary Serbian (SrpKor2013). To explore the ideational resources of Serbian nominal groups, this paper reviews the features of four systems: classification, epithesis, numeration, and focus. To investigate the textual resources of Serbian nominal groups, the paper continues with the detailed discussions of the deixis, selection, and qualification systems.

Keywords:

• Serbian
• nominal group
• systemic functional grammar
• experiential meaning
• textual meaning
• subjacency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The phenomenon of higher-level patterns being realized by lower-level patterns has been referred to as metaredundancy (Lemke 1984).

2 So far, Serbian has been extremely under-represented in SFG research – excepting one paper outlining a systemic functional perspective on Serbian tense (Stosic 2019).

3 To access the full text, see https://www.rts.rs/page/stories/sr/story/125/drustvo/789356/dve-zrtve-zemljotresa-u-kraljevu.html.

4 Corpus of Contemporary Serbian (version SrpKor2013), compiled by Duško Vitas and Miloš Utvić, Copyright Language Resources and Technologies Society.

5 Entities construing activity and property are technical terms (itemized activities and itemized properties at the field level), which are congruently realized by nominal groups at the lexicogrammatical stratum. Such entities should not be confused with grammatical metaphors, which refer to incongruent realizations and fall outside the scope of this study. For a comprehensive discussion on entity types in disciplinary scientific discourses, see Hao (2020) and Stosic (2021).

6 Elliptical nominal groups, in which the Thing is inferred from the co(n)text, are not explicitly discussed in this paper. Thing-less nominal group realizations in Serbian include structures such as oni ∅ koji ćute ‘those ∅ who stay silent’ (SrpKor2013).

7 Note that this paper treats collective (e.g., deca ‘children’), mass (e.g., voda ‘water’), and abstract (e.g., zemljotres ‘earthquake’) nouns as subtypes of common noun.

8 In Serbian, all word classes can be separated into two broad categories depending on whether they involve inflection or not (Stanojčić and Popović 1992; Klajn 2005). On the one hand, the forms of prepositions, conjunctions, particles, cardinal numerals 5 or higher (5+), and adverbs (except for comparison in some cases) remain unchanged regardless of their function. On the other, the forms of nominals (i.e., nouns (incl. pronouns), adjectives, determiners, and numerals (except for 5+ cardinals)), and verbs change depending on their function. The inflection of nominals is traditionally called declension while the inflection of verbs is labeled conjugation.

9 Note that, when followed by a locative noun, the English translation of the Serbian preposition u changes to ‘in’. For a detailed discussion on the use of prepositions with dependent cases in Serbian, see Stanojčić and Popović (1992, 265–85).

10 The use of nominative as the ‘basic’ form is common practice in descriptions of Serbian nominal groups. The only exception is partitive nominal structures realizing plural numerated and focused groups (see Sections 3.3-4), in which the Thing function is always realized by a genitive noun (cf. partitivne sintagme ‘partitive syntagms’ in Stanojčić and Popović 1992).

11 In SFG descriptions of English, the structure of a subclassified nominal group typically comprises the Classifier function preceding the Thing (see Halliday and Matthiessen 2014). However, due to the recursiveness of subclassification in Serbian, this paper has adopted an alternative view on subclassified nominal groups as univariate structures (as proposed in Martin, Doran, and Zhang 2021).

12 These structures realize the discourse semantic system of entity characterisation, proposed as a way of building deeper item taxonomies at the level of field, by Stosic (2021).

13 In Figure 3, note that the word genralizovani ‘generalized’ is treated as an adjective (rather than a verb) because its form is marked for case.

14 If needed, prepositions are used to further specify the relational meaning construed by the dependent case form of a noun. For a detailed discussion on the use of prepositions with dependent cases in Serbian, see Stanojčić and Popović (1992, 265–85).

15 In Serbian, it is also possible for a single Epithet to be realized by an adjective complex. In this case, there is a logical relation between the adjectives, which form a complex that functions as a satellite (i.e., Epithet) describing the Thing (e.g., novi i lepši ‘new and more beautiful’ describes svet ‘world’ in novi i lepši svet ‘new and more beautiful world’).

16 In paucal nominal groups, masculine form of the numeral 2 is used for both masculine and neuter nouns.

17 The only exception being uncountable nouns in numerated nominal groups construing imprecise measurement, which are used in their singular genitive form (e.g., dosta vod-e ‘lots of water-f.sg.gen’).

18 Like with their paucal counterparts, the different clause-level roles of plural numerated groups can be signaled by a preposition (e.g., Matter signaled by o ‘about’ in Govorili su o 40 pripadnik-a … ‘They talked about 40 members-gen … ’).

19 Hypothetically speaking, collective numerals could be declined. However, as is the case with paucal numerals, contemporary Serbian speakers tend to use only their basic form (Stanojčić and Popović 1992).

20 At the clause level, different functions of a focused group are signaled by the case of the embedded group functioning as Focus, which can be expanded by a preposition (e.g., Matter signaled by o + loc ‘about + loc’ in Govorili su o jačin-i zemljotres-a. ‘They talked about the magnitude-loc of the earthquake-gen’).

21 The partitive meaning is only one of the meanings of genitive in Serbian. In the nominal group prošl-e nedelj-e ‘last-gen week-gen’, for instance, genitive is used to express temporal location.

22 Qualified nominal groups are discussed in detail in Section 4.3.

23 In traditional grammars of Serbian, these are typically labeled as prepositional-case structures (predloško-padežne konstrukcije ’prepositional-case structures’ Stanojčić and Popović 1992).