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Verbs and Tenses
On these pages you will find explanations of verb usage in
Serbian. We will see that verbs come in many forms:
infinitive, stem, present participle, past participle,
passive participle. We use verbs to denote the time of
an action or event. Therefore, we have three basic tenses:
present, past and future.
The menu on the left is self-explanatory, but here is a
brief summary.
| Explanations
of verb forms |
| Infinitive verb
form: |
the form
of the verb that appears in the dictionary. In
Serbian, such verbs end in iti
(piti drink), -ati
(θitati read), -eti
(doneti bring), or any variant of ti
(jesti eat). A small group of verbs
have the infinitive ending in ζi
(iζi go). |
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| Stem:
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the base
of the verb, usually denoting the text before the
infinitive suffix or any other suffix. For example,
the stem of
piti drink is
pi. |
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| Participles:
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non-finite
verb forms used in compound tenses or voices (active
or passive). For example: pevajuζi singing
is a present participle, svirao played
is the past participle, napravljen made
is a passive participle. |
Verbs can express the time of an action or event. Thus,
we have three basic tenses: present, past and future. On
these pages we discuss how to form these tenses and discuss
when they are used. This is the most comprehensive and
complex aspect of verb usage, so we have many pages
dedicated to describing rules for forming verb tenses.
In addition to denoting absolute tenses (present, past,
future), verbs can also express aspect, indicating
whether the action or event has been completed or not. Based
on this, we have
perfective
and imperfective verbs. As the name says, perfective
verbs indicate that the event or action is completed. Thus,
perfective verbs cannot express present tense.
In addition to tense and aspect, verbs can also express
voice. Voice is basically a point of view. If the subject of
the sentence is the one who is doing the action, i.e., if
the sentence is about the doer of an action, then we have
active voice.
If the sentence is about the entity that is undergoing the
action denoted by the verb, then, we are talking about the
passive voice. As you can see, passive voice has nothing
to do with tense .
| Verb
conjugations and Verb classes |
Verbs change their morphological form depending on
tense, aspect or voice, or depending on the person (1st,
2nd , 3rd ), or gender of the subject.
These different forms or inflections on the same verb are
called verb conjugations or verb classes.
Serbian has three verb classes or three conjugations
patterns.
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