Buch, Englisch, Band 148, 64 Seiten
Buch, Englisch, Band 148, 64 Seiten
Reihe: Languages of the World, Materials
ISBN: 978-3-89586-161-1
Verlag: LINCOM
Serbo-Croatian has all the most important typological characteristics of the Slavonic languages, that is a rich inflectional morphology, an extensive agreement system, so-called free word order, a rich set of morphophonemic alternations, the pervasive aspectual opposition, a double negation, a reflexive possessive and so on.
Some of the interesting specifics of Serbo-Croatian are: 1) four accents with pitch and length involved (only Slovene among Slavonic languages has a somewhat similar system of accents); 2) it is the only Slavonic language that has preserved a three-member system of deixis according to degrees of distance and with the same consonant alternation v/t/n by demonstrative pronouns, adverbs and even by so-called presentatives; 3) in place of an infinitive in certain constructions where its understood subject can be retrieved from the syntactic context, Serbo-Croatian (especially in the eastern region) often uses a subordinate clause consisting of the subordinator da and a present-tense verb form - this phenomenon is typical to the area of Balkan languages (Bulgarian and Macedonian have the same construction).
The present volume begins with a section on phonology (vowels, consonants, accents). This is followed by a description of morphology (nominal: nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals; verbal morphology). The syntax is presented in the third section, in which noun phrase, clause structure, coordination, subordination (especially relatives), negation, word order and discourse related phenomena are described. The volume also contains a sample text with interlinear transcription and translation and an ample bibliography.