Current issues in the standardization of Serbian syntax

This paper deals with how certain phenomena in the Serbian language become more frequent at particular stages of its development, and thus attract the attention of linguistic scholarship. As regards the phenomena in the contemporary Serbian language, they are also viewed in terms of whether they can be accepted as part of the standard language. In this paper the said approach is applied on a concrete example of a phenomenon initially observed as, loosely speaking, breaking down of a verbal lexeme into verbal and nominal components, originally named as predicate decomposition. At the outset, this construction was criticized, having been interpreted as the result of foreign influence, and was not recognized as part of the literary/standard language. In order to form a scientifically grounded view on the process of decomposition, it was necessary to conduct a more thorough study, thereby determining its origin, character, as well as function within the language. The phenomenon has been studied in detail (with a focus on verbal lexicon) since the late 1970s, following the publication of a work by Milorad Radovanovic, which marked a significant shift in our understanding of (verbal) decomposition. The claim that this phenomenon was imported into Serbian from other languages has been firmly refuted. It has been established that word decomposition is part of the internal developmental processes of contemporary Serbian, as part of the processes of nominalization, which is a feature that can be found in other contemporary European languages. Moreover, research has confirmed that verb decomposition enhances the expressive potential of contemporary Serbian language in alignment with the development of society and culture it serves, that is, that sentences with decomposed and non-decomposed words are by no means absolutely synonymous. The areas of its distribution have been identified according to various parameters. On the synchronic plane, these boundaries lie among certain functional styles: decomposition is typical of specialized functional styles, but appears, to a much lesser extent, in others as well - including the literary style. Today, more than a century since the syntactic phenomenon of word composition was first noted in scholarly literature, it is no loger debatable whether the syntactic constructions arising from this process are a result of the development of the Serbian language or whether they belong in the standard language. After examining the scope and nature of the use of these syntactic constructions, particularly in specific, specialized functional styles, it becomes evident how impoverished the language would be if they were to be removed from the standard, assuming such a move were even possible, given its widespread use. On the other hand, even though we now know that decomposition does not include only verbs, and among verbs not only those in predicative function, but is also characteristic of other word classes, such as nouns, adjectives and adverbs, linguistic scholarship still predominantly focuses on the decomposition of the verbal predicate, while other aspects of this process have been less researched. Decomposition is not represented exhaustively in grammars, as compared to what is known about it in syntactic science. They should contain presentations of the decomposition of all such lexemes in predicative function, followed by all other syntactic positions - to provide their syntactic models. The task at hand is to systematically analyze the decomposition of all word classes, so that it may be appropriately treated in grammatical descriptions. The phenomenon of word composition can also serve to provide an answer to the perennial question: Which language processes can be incorporated into the standard language? The answer is quite simple: the language phenomena that are initiated within Serbian standard language as part of its developmental processes and operate in alignment with internal linguistic laws rightfully belong to the standard language.