Larisa Zlatic Study Serbian Service

Serbian Alphabet

Word order
   - Clitic Order
   - Declarative
   - Interrogative
   - Imperative

Verbs and Tenses

Nouns

Prepositions

The order of Serbian clitics

The clitic-second rule

Clitics or unaccented verbal or pronominal elements, like ‘sam’, ‘je’, ‘li’, ‘se’, etc. must appear after the first word or after the first phrase in a sentence. Thus, they always occur in the second position in the sentence.

Clitics appearing after the second word

(1)	a.	Da li dolaziš?	‘Are you coming?’
	b.	Ti si dobro.	‘You are good.’

Here, ‘li’ and ‘si’ appear in the second position, after the accented words ‘da’, and ‘ja’, respectively.
So, you cannot have (I indicate bad sentences with ‘*’):

(1)	c.	* Li da dolaziš.
	d.	* Si ti dobro.

Clitics appearing after the first whole phrase

So far, we have seen clitics appearing after the first, single word. What happens if we have a whole phrase, as in:

(2)	a.	[Moj brat] ga je video.	‘My brother saw him.’
	b.	[Moj] ga je brat video.

Both sentences have the same meaning, as indicated. In (2a), the clitics ‘ga’ and ‘je’ appear after the first noun phrase moj brat ‘my brother’, while in (2b), the same clitics appear after the first word moj ‘my’.

So, as long as you follow the rule that clitics must appear in the second position in the sentence, with the word order shown in Table 1 above, you’ll be able to produce the grammatical sentences.

Ordering of clitics in a sentence

What happens if we have more than one clitic in a sentence? What is their order with respect to one another? Look at this sentence:

(3)

Da li si došao?

‘Did you come?'

We see that ‘li’ appears before the helping (auxiliary) verb of ‘jesam’, namely ‘si’. This order is fixed. We cannot switch the order of li and si, as the ungrammatical sentence below shows.

(4)

* Da si li došao?

Table 1 below shows the clitic order in a sentence, when we have more than one clitic.

Table 1: Clitic ordering in a sentence:

1: li	2: helping (auxiliary) verbs	3: dative pronouns	4: accusative and genitive pronouns	5:se	6:je
li	bih, bi, bi, bismo, biste, bi ću, ćeš, će, ćemo, ćete, će sam, si, smo, ste, su	mi, ti, mu joj, nam vam, im	me, te, ga je/ju, nas vas, ih	se	je

The clitics in the 5^th and 6^th columns: ‘se’ + ‘je’, when combined, usually become just ‘se’, as in the following example:

(5)

On se je nasmejao -> On se nasmejao.

“He smiled.”

Also, when you have a feminine accusative pronoun ‘je’ (see the fourth column above) and the auxiliary verb ‘je’ (the column 6 above), the first ‘je’ becomes ‘ju’. Here are some examples.

(6)

On je vidi.
he her sees
“He sees her.’

(je = an accusative feminine singular pronoun, it is a clitic here)

Now, look at this example where we have a past tense verb:

(7)	a.	On je našao nju. He has found	(nju = accusative feminine singular pronoun - not a clitic here).
	b.	On ju je našao.	(ju = accusative feminine singular pronoun, it is a clitic here).

Both sentences in (7) mean the same thing: “He has found her”. In the first example, (7a), nju ‘her’ is the accusative full (non-clitic) pronoun and it can appear at the end of the sentence.

However in the second example, in (7b), ‘ju’ ‘her’ is the accusative truncated form of ‘nju’, and thus clitic. As a clitic, it must appear in the second position in the sentence. And since it appears with the auxiliary verb ‘je’, we must change ‘je’ into ‘ju’, so we have the sequence: ‘ju je’. Makes sense? If it doesn’t, put this off for a while.