Relational & participial

Lesson opening

This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.

Relational and participial adjectives: drveni, pečen, sledeći

Adjectives come in very different kinds. Some name a quality, something there can be more or less of: lep, lepši, najlepši “beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful”. Others name a relation to something else: drvena kuća is a house “made of wood”, gradski autobus a bus “of the city”, jučerašnje novine the paper “of yesterday”. You cannot turn such a feature up: a house is either wooden or it is not, and nothing is “more wooden” than it. English has such words too: nobody says “a very nuclear physicist”.

And there is a third group: adjectives grown out of verbs, such as pečen hleb “baked bread”, otvorena vrata “an open door”, prošla godina “last year”, sledeći put “next time”. You know the forms from the lessons “Past passive participle” and “The l-participle”; what is new is that the participle stops being a verb form and lives as an ordinary describing word. The lesson also shows why an English -ing participle (“the man reading a book”) must be rebuilt in Serbian.

Four tests: qualitative or relational

Four tests tell the two kinds apart.

The first test is the most reliable: can there be “more” of the feature? Bread can be fresher, so svež “fresh” is qualitative. But pšenični hleb “wheat bread” is made from wheat, and it will never become “wheatier”.

Relational adjectives: fixed form, no degrees

The lesson “Adjective-forming suffixes” showed how these words are made; here we look at their forms. The key property of a relational adjective (odnosni pridev) is that it usually does not choose between the short and the long form: the suffix has made the choice for it.

Two mirror-image extremes. Words in -ski, -ni, -šnji, -ji are frozen at the “long” end: their masculine nominative always ends in -i, even after je “is”: Ovaj problem je tehnički “This problem is a technical one”, Film je srpski “The film is Serbian”. The possessives in -ov, -in are frozen at the “short” end in the nominative: Ovo je bratov auto “This is my brother’s car”, not “bratovi auto”. In the other cases they usually take the long endings, like novog: bratovog auta, u bratovom stanu (lesson “Possessive adjectives”). They work much like the English possessive ’s, but they agree with the noun like any adjective. The material adjectives in -en/-an sit in the middle: both forms exist, and their place in the sentence decides. After je you get the short one (Sat je zlatan “The watch is gold”, Sto je drven “The table is wooden”); in front of a noun the long one is more usual (zlatni sat “a gold watch”, drveni sto “a wooden table”).

Note the soft stem of dečji: dečjeg, dečjem, with e instead of o, as in letnji “summer” (lesson “Adjective declension”). And bratova looks the same in both forms in the feminine, like nova: the short form of a possessive shows only in the masculine, bratov.

A phrase saying what something is made of can become one adjective: kuća od drveta “a house made of wood” is drvena kuća, vrata od gvožđa “a door made of iron” is gvozdena vrata, prsten od zlata is zlatan prsten. Time words work the same way: juče “yesterday” gives jučerašnje novine “yesterday’s paper”, sutra “tomorrow” gives sutrašnji sastanak “tomorrow’s meeting”. Two pairs of look-alikes are easy to mix up. Drveni is “wooden”, but drevni is “ancient”. Jučerašnji is “yesterday’s”, but večerašnji (from večeras “tonight”) is “tonight’s”: večerašnji koncert “tonight’s concert”.

Zlatan sat and zlatno srce: a relational adjective turns qualitative

The border between the kinds runs not through the word but through its meaning. The same adjective is relational in its literal sense and qualitative in a figurative one, and then it can be compared.

Cheat sheet

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Relational and participial adjectives

Qualitative (opisni): a measurable feature; relational (odnosni): a relation to a thing, time, material, owner; participial: verbs as modifiers.

Four tests

Relational: the suffix sets the form

Long even after je: Film je srpski. Material: Sat je zlatan, but zlatni sat. “Made of”, “of yesterday”: kuća od drveta → drvena kuća, juče → jučerašnje novine. Look-alikes: drveni “wooden”, drevni “ancient”; jučerašnji “yesterday’s”, večerašnji “tonight’s”.

Figurative: qualitative

Then degrees: najzlatnije srce. Two labels: više policijski nego pravni.

Participial: three types

English -ing participle: a koji clause

Participle → verb with koji (gender, number: the noun’s; case: its role in the clause); never drop koji. Passive ones carry over: pročitana knjiga; with dependents, after: pismo napisano juče.