Word order in English and Serbian

Vol.4,No.1(2011)

Abstract
The paper deals with case and grammatical relations in English and Serbian. Serbian has a very rich case system involving the infl ection for case of nouns, pronouns and adjectives. Since there are seven cases in Serbian, they bear the main burden of marking the syntactic function of a noun phrase and the word order is relatively free. However, in English nouns are not case marked and only the English pronominal system can be said to have the grammatical category of case and most of the grammarians would say that English word order is fi xed. Due to their different nature, Serbian being a synthetic language and English an analytic one, word order seems to have different functional values in the two languages. In English it is the main syntactic means, while in Serbian it is mainly a pragmatic, textual and stylistic means.

Keywords:
word order; grammatical relations; case; English; Serbian
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