An overview of the participles ending in -ci, -vsi and -m(i) from the perspective of the lexicographic description of the contemporary Serbian language
Authors: Jovanovic Vladan 
Published: December 2021

From the perspective of lexicography, this paper presents an analysis of
participles ending in -ci, -vsi and -m(i), which in contemporary Serbian
language fall within two categories: 1) the category of contemporary
participial continuants, whose action is attributed to the noun as a
temporary, current feature at a definite point in time, and 2) the category
of adjectives that semantically correspond to past participles or to
adjectives proper. As regards the descriptive dictionaries of the
contemporary Serbian language, the participles ending in -ci, -vsi and -m(i)
are lexicographically treated primarily in the Dictionary of the Serbian
Academy of Sciences and Arts (the SASA Dictionary). Comparing the example
sentences excerpted from various texts belonging to the contemporary
standard Serbian language, on the one hand, with those excerpted from the
SASA Dictionary, on the other, it can be noted that the SASA Dictionary does
not contain examples of participle forms with the reflexive morpheme -se,
while they can be said to be confirmed in other sources. This can be
explained as resulting from the impact of the Serbian language norm,
according to which participles do not belong to the contemporary standard
Serbian language. This is especially true of forms containing the reflexive
morpheme -se, which are not to be found in any modern grammar of the
standard Serbian language. It is concluded in the paper that the SASA
Dictionary treats the participle forms of both aforementioned categories and
of three separate participle forms according to the verb tense (past and
present) and voice (active and passive). As for the sources confirming the
use of these forms, they can be found not only in those dating from the first half of the 19th century, when participles were commonplace in the
literary language of Serbs, but also in the works of the 20th-century
authors using the contemporary standard Serbian language. In accordance with
that, the conclusion to be drawn is that participles should be treated and
included in dictionaries, both in those whose compilation is ongoing (i.e.
the SASA Dictionary) and in the future dictionaries of the contemporary
Serbian language. The excerpted material shows that participles are used by
prominent authors in Serbian science, religion and culture. As for the issue
of which label to use for the indicated types of participles in the
descriptive dictionary of the contemporary Serbian language, it is argued in
this paper that in order to resolve it one should take into consideration at
least two sets of facts related to the presented material. One refers to the
examples of the formation of participles that in fact originate from the
older layers of our literary language and which have been preserved in
identical or similar form to this day (e.g. odsedsi, usopsi), while the
other concerns participles created in a contemporary synchronic process
involving contemporary verbs in current use and their meanings (dogorevajuca
sveca, plac radjajucih stvorenja, etc.). The former set of examples is marked
with standard labels, such as ?zast.? (?obsolete?), ?arh.? (?archaic?),
?rsl.? (?Russian Church Slavonic?), ?csl.? (?New Church Slavonic?), ?ssl.?
(?Serbian Church Slavonic?), ?stknj. arh.? (?from earlier literary sources,
old-fashioned?), used in the lexicographic description of participles in the
SASA Dictionary, which can also be used in other descriptive dictionaries of
the contemporary Serbian language to indicate the literary epoch in which a
particular form of participle originated, or its pragmatic value. Concerning
the latter set of participles, if they were to be introduced into a
descriptive dictionary of the Serbian language, they would require different
labels, since these are the words formed according to the
participle-building pattern of the present-day synchronic
lexical-grammatical process.