Serbo-Croatian grammar
"[3] Pronouns, nouns, adjectives and some numerals decline (change the word ending to reflect case, the grammatical category and function) whereas verbs conjugate for person and tense.
Deviations from the standard SVO order are stylistically marked and may be employed to convey a particular emphasis, mood or overall tone, according to the intentions of the speaker or writer.
Nouns have three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) that correspond, to a certain extent, with the word ending.
The grammatical gender of a noun affects the morphology of other parts of speech (adjectives, pronouns, and verbs) attached to it.
Nouns are declined into seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental, albeit with considerable syncretism (overlap) especially in the plural.
There are seven tenses, four of which (present, perfect, future I and II) are used in contemporary Serbo-Croatian, and the other three (aorist, imperfect and pluperfect) used much less frequently.
The pluperfect is generally limited to written language and some more educated speakers, and the aorist and imperfect are considered stylistically marked and rather archaic.
Serbo-Croatian makes a distinction between three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, instrumental) and two numbers (singular and plural).
The dative and locative cases mostly coincide; however, in some nouns they have a different pitch accent: grȃd — grȃdu — grádu, stvȃr — stvȃri — stvári.
Serbo-Croatian has three main declensional types, traditionally called a-type, e-type and i-type respectively, according to their genitive singular ending.
Most masculine monosyllabic and some bisyllabic words receive an additional suffix -ov- or -ev- throughout the plural (bor – borovi 'pine', panj – panjevi 'stump').
Some loanwords, chiefly of French origin, preserve the ending vowel (-e, -i, -o, -u) as part of the stem; those ending in -i receive an additional epenthetic -j- suffix in oblique cases: kàfē – kafèi 'café', pànō – panòi 'billboard', kànū – kanùi 'canoe', tàksi – taksiji 'taxi'.
The pluralia tantum nouns vráta, ústa and plúća can have the suffix -ijū in genitive plural: vrátijū, ústijū, plúćijū.
The gender of these nouns is either feminine (e.g. hlače 'trousers', gaće 'pants', grudi 'chest') or neuter (e.g. kola 'car', leđa 'back', usta 'mouth').
Slavic verbs in general are characterized by a relatively low number of stems, from which a wide variety of meanings is achieved by prefixation.
The last two are not used often in daily speech (more often in Bosnia and Herzegovina than in Croatia and Serbia)[citation needed], especially the imperfect.
The imperfect is considered archaic in speech and appears only in certain expressions like "Kako se zvaše" ("What was it called").
The aorist is often used to indicate that something has just now happened, for example "Ispadoše mi ključevi" ("My keys fell down").
[citation needed] The aorist form of the verb "otići" ("to go away") is often used to refer to an immediate future, for example "Odoh na spavanje" ("I'm going to sleep").
It is used only with verbs of the perfective aspect 1: For actions that have just now happened, right before you talk about it (often with an emotional nuance): Examples: "Ujede me komarac" ("A mosquito bit me") "Ode mi autobus" ("I missed the bus/The bus went away") "Baš sad htedoh da te nazovem" ("I just wanted to call you") "Uništiše mi ovi moljci košulju" ("These moths destroyed my shirt") "Pomislih na tebe" ("I have just thought about you") 2: One time actions that happened at some point in the past.
This meaning of the aorist appears often in storytelling "Bio sam u kući, kad neki ljudi zakucaše na vrata.
Limited to certain verbs "Odoh sad u školu" ("I'm going to school now") "Pomresmo od gladi" ("We are starving") Besides the indicative, Serbo-Croatian uses the imperative, conditional, and the optative.
The optative may be translated into English by an imperative construction, with set phrases (such as the already exemplified 'long live'), or by use of the modal verb may.
But if other prefixes are added, modifying the meaning, the verb becomes perfective: zapisati 'to write down' or prepisati 'to copy by hand'.
Because of that dualism, some grammars (chiefly Serbian ones) treat jesam as a defective verb having only present tense.
Others treat these forms as two realizations of the same irregular verb biti, jesam being imperfective and budem perfective.
Examples are: kada (when) – sada (now), tada (then), nikada (never), ponekad (sometimes), uvijek (always), jučer (yesterday), danas (today), sutra (tomorrow), prekosutra (the day after tomorrow), lani (last year), večeras (tonight), odmah/smjesta (now/at once), zatim (then), uskoro (soon), napokon (at last); otkad (from when) – odsad (from now on), oduvijek (from always – oduvijek sam te volio – I have (from) always loved you); dokad (until when) – dosad (until now), dogodine (next year).
Serbo-Croatian closely observes Wackernagel's Law that clitics (unstressed functional words) are placed in the second position in all clauses.
Multiple clitics are grouped in the following fixed order: Relative clauses are frequent in modern Serbo-Croatian since they have expanded as attributes at the expense of the participles performing that function.
Also, it occurs much more frequently than other adjectival relative pronouns: in comparison with their specialized semantic functions such as possessiveness (čiji 'whose'), quality (kakav 'what sort of') or quantity (koliki 'how large'), the pronoun koji has the broadest scope of reference and identification with the referent.
