ABSTRACT
MORPHOLOGICAL PROPERTIES OF SERBIAN NOUNS Serbian is a highly inflected, free word order language in which morphology plays a pivotal role in conveying relational aspects among sentence constituents. All open class words, as well as some types of closed class words, consist of a base morpheme to which an inflectional affix is appended. Different word types are characterized by codified sets of morphological transformations (i .e., declensions and conjugations) which indicate a word's possible thematic roles in a sentence. Nouns in the Serbian language are characterized by three grammatical attributes-case (e .g. , nominative, genitive, dative, etc.), grammatical number (singular, plural), and gender (masculine, feminine and neuter). These attributes are marked by a suffix added to the base form of a noun which specifies a particular combination of the grammatical attributes. Thus, for example, if the suffix i is attached to the masculine noun konj ('horse') it will indicate the nominative plural case (kanji). If however, the suffix em is attached to the same noun it will indicate the instrumental singular case. Each noun can appear in all cases, both singular and plural. In contrast, grammatical gender is an intrinsic property of a word; a particular noun can be of one gender only. Nouns of the same gender take a fixed set of transformations (i .e., declension) to specify case and grammatical number. It should be emphasized that the same sequence of letters can specify different combinations of case and grammatical number within a particular declension and can also be used with different declensions . Take, for example, the suffix i. If attached to a feminine noun it will indicate the dative/locative singular case, while if attached to a masculine noun it will indicate the nominative plural case (see Table I and Appendix I). Moreover, because the same form of the noun can encompass several cases, an isolated noun form that corresponds to more than one case cannot be differentiated with respect to case and/or grammatical number. In such instances case specification can be provided either by context or by intonation. Noun forms for the three genders and cases they encompass are presented in Appendix 2.
