Which case a verb takes

Lesson opening

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

Which case a verb takes

You know this about prepositions: od takes the genitive, kroz the accusative, never the other way round. A verb behaves the same way: it takes its object in one particular case, sometimes with one particular preposition. The verb čekati “to wait for” takes the accusative, bojati se “to be afraid of” the genitive, verovati “to believe, trust” the dative, baviti se “to be engaged in, do” the instrumental, and misliti “to think”, in Mislim na tebe “I’m thinking of you”, the preposition na with the accusative. This habit of a verb is called its government, in Serbian rekcija. The lesson “Preposition–case government” gave you the map of prepositions; today comes the map of verbs, and it is more capricious.

English has government too, made of prepositions: you depend on, consist of, wait for, and nobody can say why it is on and not from. Serbian does the job with cases, and its choices rarely match yours, even on the commonest verbs. English waits for the bus; Serbian waits the bus, autobus, with no preposition. English thanks the professor as a direct object; Serbian thanks to him, profesoru, in the dative. English plays football and plays the guitar with one verb; Serbian has two, igrati fudbal and svirati gitaru. No rule predicts the mismatches: government is a frozen, historical part of a grammar. But the list is finite, and you learn it in blocks of “verb + case”, like vocabulary.

No preposition: four cases

First, the verbs with no preposition: the object follows the verb, and the only question is its case. There are four groups. The accusative is the biggest; the verbs of the other three are best learnt by name.

Čekam autobus već pola sata. I've been waiting for the bus for half an hour.

Pitaj konobara gde je toalet. Ask the waiter where the toilet is.

Bavim se plivanjem tri puta nedeljno. I swim three times a week.

In English most verbs of the three smaller groups take a plain object (remember her, help him), which is why they need learning. One pattern stands out: nearly all the genitive verbs come with the little word se (bojati se, sećati se, čuvati se); the lesson “The se-constructions” looked at such verbs. One way to see it: se is, by origin, the short accusative of “oneself”, so the direct-object slot is already taken, and the real object moves into another case, here the genitive (though nadati se takes the dative, and baviti se the instrumental).

Genitive: fear, memory, giving up, and the preposition od

The genitive group is small but frequent, and it contains one verb that trips English speakers every day.

Fear is the easy one: English says afraid of, and bojati se and plašiti se take the genitive, the case of “of”. The key line is sećati se. English remember takes a plain direct object, which tempts you to use the accusative; Serbian takes only the genitive. Sećam se tvoje sestre. I remember your sister. The same with a pronoun: Ne sećam se toga. I don’t remember that. The perfective setiti se has the same pattern: Setio sam se lozinke. I remembered the password.

The second genitive group comes with the preposition od. English gives no reliable hint here: it spreads the idea over four prepositions, while Serbian always says od: zavisiti od “depend on”, sastojati se od “consist of”, odustati od “give up”, oporaviti se od “recover from”, razlikovati se od “differ from”, oprostiti se od “say goodbye to”, patiti od “suffer from”. French and Spanish agree with Serbian: dépendre de, depender de.

Sve zavisi od vremena. It all depends on the weather.

Cheat sheet

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Which case a verb takes

Government (rekcija): the case (and preposition) a verb requires. Learn it with the verb.

No preposition

With a preposition

The case changes the meaning

Double government