NOTES ON THE SYNTAX OF THE BARANJA TRANSCRIPTION OF DUŠAN’S CODE
Authors:   University of Niš, Faculty of Medicine, Serbia, Antić Aleksandra M. 
Published: September 2024

After analyzing the syntactic language in the Baranja transcription, it was discovered that adjectives and verbs generally matched the gender of the noun they were describing, even if the natural and grammatical genders differed. Plural nouns were usually matched with plural verbs, and singular verbs were used with multi-mem- ber subject expressions. The expected form of nouns was typically used with the basic numbers two, three, and four, while the genitive plural form was used with numbers greater than five and with the noun thousand. However, the construction of the base number twelve deviated from the expected form and used the genitive plural instead of the dual form, under the influence of the Serbian vernacular. The Baranja transcription does not differ from other medieval monuments in terms of word order in noun phras- es: the noun phrase generally followed the attribute, although the number of examples in which it follows the noun phrase is not negligible. Also, there were instances where the noun was placed between two attributes. Cases in which the accusative pronominal enclitic precedes the enclitic form of the verb Esmq are also registered in the corpus, which testify to an older word order. Depersonalization, as one of the main character- istics of the style of business law and legal documents, is achieved through the frequent use of passive constructions, primarily reflexive ones. Numerous reflexive passive con- structions and sporadic participial passive constructions contributed to emphasizing the general validity of the legal provisions presented in Dušan’s Code. The tendency to- wards nominalization is reflected in the use of decomposed predicates, built according to different structural models with the copulative verb bQti and semi-copulative verbs dati, imati, ou;initi, etc. Attested examples of decomposed predicates are mostly used in the Baranja transcription of Dušan’s Code in parallel with one-word verb expressions (e.g. biti svade and svaditi se; ou;initi gMsM and gMsiti). The Baranja transcription of Dušan’s Code is rich in examples of the use of participles. The present active participle generally has a determinative role, although there are recorded examples in which it appears in the function of a gerund. The role of an attribute could be taken by the parti- ciple of the present passive. Forms of the preterite active participle most often have the meaning of situational determination. In addition to several examples of the use of this participle in the function of the gerund, there are also isolated examples of its substan- tivization and use in the function of the conjunction. The preterite passive participles were not only found in passive constructions but also as attributes and substantives. The use of the perfect participle was limited to the construction of complex verb tenses and modes. The abundance of examples of sentences with the optative periphrasis da + present, characteristic of the Serbian vernacular, indicates that in the Baranja tran- scription, this was the main way of expressing directivity; at the same time, it should be emphasized that the connection between the particle da and the form of the present tense of the third person singular, dual or plural was most often direct and that confir- mations of interpolation of sentence members are not numerous (except when dealing with enclitic forms of pronouns).