Mikita V. Suprunchuk. Substantive Inflection in Serbian: Synthesis of Word Forms.
Minsk: Belarusian State University, 2005. Professor Dr. habil. Boris Norman was the scientific adviser.
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Key words: alternation, animacy, case, declension, grammar and lexis interaction, inflection, interaction of categories, morphological gender, number, paradigm, Serbian, variation
The nouns of the modern Serbian are the object of the research. The status, structure, representation and functioning of the grammatical categories of Serbian nouns are the subject of the research. The research is aimed at creating a formal model of Serbian noun inflection. General methodology is determined by the system approach to language studying. The synchronous-contrastive description is the main method; historical and quantitative data and some elements of the seme analysis are drawn as well.
The novelty of the research is connected with the way lexical and grammati-cal components of Serbian nouns meaning are described. This way allows to take into account the former component minimally and to build the paradigms using the latter one only. It is for the first time in Serbian linguistics that the cases are elaborated by a special formal procedure and such a specific form as the numerative case (“brojna forma”, “the 234 form”, “the counted form”) is described. The paper improves the description of morphophonemic alternations, which accompany the declension of nouns. The status, structure and ways of expression of the gender, number, case and animacy in Serbian are presented in a new manner. The latest changes in this sphere and the interaction of grammatical categories are considered as well. A new classifica-tion of declensional types is proposed. There is an algorithm developed which allows to build any substantive paradigm using given grammatical information. A consider-able corpus of language data, including contrastive one, is drawn.
The results of the research may be used in computer algorithms of text synthesis; in the practice of Serbian language and contrastive Slavonic grammar teaching; in compiling textbooks, mono- and bilingual dictionaries, including grammatical ones; in further researches in Slavonic grammar, social linguistics, applied linguistics. This attempt of inflection calculus will come in handy for creating electronic corpora of Slavonic languages, automatic systems of text generation and translation.