A1 — beginnerThe nominative case

Subject & predicate nominative

Lesson opening

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

Subject and predicate: the nominative at work

In “Nominative forms” you saw the two jobs of this case: it marks whoever acts, and it is the form of the word after biti “to be” when you say who or what someone is. Now that you know every form of biti, let’s build sentences out of it. A sentence has two main parts: the subject (whoever acts or is being talked about) and the predicate (what is said about the subject). In both jobs the noun stands in one and the same case, the nominative. (A reminder: a case is the form a noun takes to show its role in the sentence. English keeps a trace of this only in its pronouns: he sees, but we see him.)

Take two sentences: Student čita. “The student is reading” and On je student. “He is a student”. In the first, student is the subject; in the second, it is part of the predicate. Yet both times it is the nominative, the plain dictionary form. Along the way we will see which English habits to leave at the door.

The nominative as the subject

The subject is the main character of the sentence. It stands in the nominative, singular or plural (student, studenti), whatever sentence it lands in, and the verb adjusts to it:

Here the subject is in the nominative (student, konobar, žena), while whatever the action is aimed at is already in the accusative (hleb in kupuje hleb). The nominative answers “who is doing it?”, the accusative “what are they doing it to?”. (hleb looks the same in both cases, as a masculine word for a thing does; a feminine word would show the difference: kafa becomes kafu.) We will come back to this contrast at the end of the lesson. And notice one more thing: Serbian has no words for “the” or “a”. Student is “the student” or “a student”, as the situation requires.

The nominative as the predicate: On je student

The nominative’s second job is to stand after the copula biti and name who or what the subject is. Here Serbian and English build the sentence the same way: “he is a student”, on je student. The copula is obligatory, as it is in English, and the noun after it stays in the nominative, exactly as in the dictionary:

The forms je, sam, smo, su are the present tense of biti; you met all of them, short and full, in “biti in the present”. What matters here is something else: the word after the copula (student, lekar, grad) is in the same nominative form as the subject. The copula works like an equals sign between two nominatives: “he = student”.

Deeper history

Why Serbian keeps the nominative after “to be”

Not every Slavic language does this. Several of Serbian’s relatives put a noun after “to be” into the instrumental case, the case of the tool (“with a pen”) and of a role (“as a doctor”). Polish, for example, says Jestem lekarzem “I am a doctor”, roughly “I am as a doctor”. Serbian does not: after biti it keeps the plain nominative in every tense, On je lekar., On je bio lekar. “He was a doctor”, not “On je lekarom”. For you this is good news: the Serbian sentence is built just like the English one, and the noun after je needs no new ending.

The historical logic is simple. The nominative is the case of identity: the copula je equates the subject with what is said about it. The instrumental in the Slavic languages originally marked a tool, a role or a temporary state (English uses as for this: “he worked as a doctor”), and some of the relatives gradually stretched it from “worked as a doctor” to “was a doctor” and “became a doctor”. Serbian followed that shift only a little: the noun stays in the nominative after biti, and usually after postati “to become” too, Postao je lekar. “He became a doctor.” (with postati the instrumental is possible as well; the lesson “Predicate & temporal” covers it). An instrumental after biti (bio je učiteljem “he was a teacher”) sounds old-fashioned today. Don’t confuse it with the instrumental object of baviti se “to be engaged in”: bavi se sportom “he does sport”. That is not a predicate at all; you will meet it in the lesson “Instrumental of means”.

Agreement: the verb adjusts to the subject

The predicate does not live on its own: it agrees with the subject in person and number. Change the subject, and the verb form changes too. The copula biti shows it most clearly:

Cheat sheet

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Subject and predicate: the nominative at work

The subject (subjekat) is who acts or is talked about; it answers ko? / šta? “who? what?”. The predicate (predikat) is what is said about it: an action (Student čita.) or the copula biti plus a noun or adjective, the nominal predicate (On je lekar.). The subject and the noun after the copula are in the dictionary form, the nominative. No articles: student = “the/a student”.

Job one: the subject

Job two: the noun after biti

The copula is an equals sign between two nominatives, “he = student”, in every tense: On je bio lekar. A predicate noun keeps its own gender and ending: about a woman, the feminine partner (Ona je studentkinja.) or, often, the masculine job name (Ona je lekar.). After postati “to become”, usually the nominative too: Postao je lekar.

The copula agrees in person and number

Examples

Subject	Copula	Example
ja (I)	sam	Ja sam student.
ti (you, singular)	si	Ti si lekar.
on / ona (he/she)	je	On je konobar.
mi (we)	smo	Mi smo prijatelji.
vi (you, plural / polite)	ste	Vi ste profesor.
oni / one (they)	su	Oni su studenti.

Ordinary verbs too: student čita / studenti čitaju. Polite Vi: plural copula, singular noun, plural adjective (Vi ste profesor., Vi ste ljubazni.). Two subjects with i: plural (Marko i Ana su ovde.). After to, the copula follows the noun: To su knjige. The subject pronoun is usually dropped (Čitaju. “They're reading.”).

A predicate adjective takes the subject's gender and number

On je dobar. · Ona je dobra. · Ono je dobro. · Oni su dobri. · One su dobre. “He / she / it is good, they are good, they (women) are good.” Endings: none / -a / -o, plural -i / -e / -a. Mixed group: masculine plural (Marko i Ana su umorni.).

Nominative or accusative

Who acts: nominative; what the action is aimed at: accusative. On vidi grad. He sees the city. Konobar donosi kafu. The waiter brings the coffee. The case decides, not the order: Knjigu čita student. Test: je between two nouns = both nominative; an action verb between them = the second is accusative.