The clitic inventory
Lesson opening
This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
Clitics: the whole inventory and its two families
You have met the word clitic several times already: it names the small words with no stress of their own that cannot stand on their own and have to lean on a neighbour. The lesson “Basic word order” showed them at work and promised a full list; the lesson “Full & clitic pronoun forms” sorted out the pronouns. Now we gather all the main clitics in one place, name each of them and see why they split into two families.
English has a few such words: ’ll in I’ll, ’s in she’s, ’em in tell ’em have no stress of their own and hang on their neighbour. Serbian clitics are the same kind of word, only written separately, and there are many more of them.
Why the full list? Ordinary Serbian words move around quite freely; clitics do not. They stand in second place and in a strict queue. Before you can manage that queue (the job of the lesson “Internal clitic order”), you have to know every member by sight.
Enclitics: one family, all in second place
Let us start with the enclitics, the ones that go to second place in the sentence, straight after the first word or the first group of words. They fall into six groups, and when several of them meet, they line up in exactly this order (you saw it in the lesson “Basic word order”):
You already know part of each group. Group 1 is a single particle, li, the marker of a yes/no question (Piješ li kafu? “Do you drink coffee?”). Groups 3 and 4 are the pronoun clitics from the lesson “Full & clitic pronoun forms”: the dative mi, ti, mu, joj (“to me, to you, to him, to her”) and the accusative/genitive me, te, ga, je (“me, you, him, her”). Group 5 is the familiar reflexive se. Group 2 and the rebel of group 6 deserve a word of their own.
Auxiliary verbs: three sets
Group 2 is the most crowded. It holds the short forms of the auxiliary (helping) verbs that Serbian uses for the past, the future and “would”, the way English uses have, will and would. There are three sets.
The first column is the short present of biti “to be” from the lesson “biti in the present”: it says “am, is, are” (Ja sam student) and builds the past tense (Ja sam radio “I worked, I was working”). One caveat: in a chain of clitics, je from this column does not sit in group 2 but goes to the very end, as group 6. The second column holds the short forms of hteti “to want”, which Serbian uses for the future (Radiću, Ja ću raditi “I will work”), much as English turned will, once “to want”, into a future marker; you saw them in the lesson “Future I”. The third, bih / bi / bismo, is the Serbian “would”: Ja bih radio “I would work”. This form is called the conditional; the lesson “Conditional I” covers it in full, and for now it is enough to know that these forms are group-2 clitics too.
Cheat sheet
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Clitics: the whole inventory and its two families
A clitic is a short word with no stress of its own: written separately, said as one with its neighbour (like English ’ll, ’s). Enclitics lean on the word to their left: they stand in second place and never start a sentence (sam, me, se, li). Proclitics lean on the word to their right and stand before it (ne and prepositions).
Enclitics: six groups in a strict order
Group 2: three sets of auxiliaries
They build the past (Ja sam radio), the future (Radiću, Ja ću raditi) and “would” (Ja bih radio). I worked. I will work. I would work.
je “is”: the rebel at the tail
All other forms of biti (sam, si, smo) sit in group 2; only je goes to the very end, after the pronouns. Next to se in the past it drops out: Ona se vratila.
Proclitics: ne and prepositions
- ne clings to the verb: ne znam, ne mogu. With biti, hteti, imati it fuses into one word: nisam, nisi, nije, nismo, niste, nisu; neću, nećeš, neće; nemam, nemaš, nema.
- Prepositions are the largest family of proclitics: each leans on its word and governs its case. In today’s speech only the full pronoun form follows a preposition: za tebe, not “za te”.
se: one form, four jobs
In every role se stays a clitic: unstressed, in second place, after the pronoun clitics (Kako ti se zove pas?).