Secondary & compound prepositions

Lesson opening

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Secondary and compound prepositions

The prepositions you have learned so far, u, na, od, s, za, kroz, are short, ancient and cannot be taken apart: there is no “word” inside them. There are about twenty, nearly all inherited from Proto-Slavic, the common ancestor of the Slavic languages, and no new ones appear. Above them lives a second storey, far more crowded and much younger: prepositions made from ordinary words within the recorded life of the language. tokom is the instrumental case of the noun tok “flow, course”; putem is “by way (of)”; umesto is a fused “in place (of)”; na osnovu “on the basis (of)” is two words acting as one. The single words are called secondary prepositions, the multi-word ones compound prepositions.

The class needs its own lesson for two reasons. The first is case: each of these prepositions requires its own case of the noun after it, and the English translation will not tell you which (pomoću takes the genitive, uprkos the dative, s obzirom na the accusative, u vezi sa the instrumental); there are clues, though, and the lesson shows them. The second is register, that is, where a word is used: most of the class is bookish and official, and much of it is plain bureaucratese. It is the language of decisions, contracts, notices and the news that will land on you in your first month in Serbia. You need to recognise these words when you read; in conversation people usually say the same thing more simply. Not all of them are bookish, though: tokom, za vreme, umesto, pored, uprkos, zahvaljujući and nasuprot are everyday words too (you know them from earlier lessons). So every preposition in this lesson carries two labels: its case and, where needed, a plain everyday equivalent.

Prepositions from nouns: time, occasion, means

The first group is the frozen instrumentals and their relatives. Every one of them, without exception, takes the genitive (the “of” case). You have met some of them (tokom, usled) in the lesson “Abstract & temporal genitive prepositions”; here they take their place in the row. tokom is the everyday “during”.

Prijava se podnosi putem sajta ministarstva. Applications are submitted via the ministry’s website.

Usled radova voda će biti isključena tokom dana. Owing to works, the water will be cut off during the day.

After the preposition the genitive appears every time: sajta, radova, dana. Inside each of these prepositions sits a noun, and a noun pulls a genitive after it, the “of” of belonging: “by way of what”. The English translations carry the clue: by way of, in the course of, by means of. Rule of thumb: a frozen instrumental in -om or -u is followed by the genitive.

Fused words: pored, umesto, uprkos, nasuprot

The second group grew from a “primary preposition + noun” pair that fused into one word and became a preposition. umesto is u + mesto “in place”, pored is po + red “along the row”, uprkos is u + prkos “in defiance, in spite”, nasuprot is na + suprot. They are written as one word; that boundary was covered in the lesson “Together vs apart”. The table adds izuzev, shodno and zahvaljujući, single words of other origins.

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Secondary and compound prepositions

Primary (u, na, za, od, s, kroz): ancient, neutral, about twenty. Secondary ones are made from words, compound ones from two or three words, written apart. Most are bookish and official: recognise them in a document, swap them in conversation; tokom, za vreme, umesto, pored, uprkos, zahvaljujući, nasuprot are everyday words too.

From nouns (frozen instrumental): all + genitive

Fused words and verb forms

Hook: a “to” in English (according to, thanks to; contrary to, a sense of nasuprot) → dative: shodno propisima, zahvaljujući vama, nasuprot pošti “opposite the post office”; and uprkos zabrani “despite the ban”.

Compound: the last part sets the case

From official to everyday