DOI: 10.18485/judig.2026.2.ch21 ISSN:

Deverbal Nominalisations in the Timok Speech: A Preliminary Corpus Study

Anđela Babić, Marko Simonović, Predrag Kovačević
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This paper presents a preliminary corpus-based study of deverbal nominalisations in the Timok speech, a speech of the Prizren-Timok dialect of Serbian. The analysis focuses on two productive morphological classes: nominalisations in -nje/-će and nominalisations in -cija . The study is based on 606 tokens extracted from the Spoken Torlak Dialect Corpus 1.0 and examines four properties: the aspectual class of the source verb, complement realisation, pluralisation, and correspondence with standard Serbian forms. The results show a strong predominance of -nje/-će nominalisations, especially those derived from imperfective verbs, while -cija nominalisations are considerably less frequent. Overt complements are rare overall, suggesting limited preservation of verbal argument structure in the corpus data, although they occur more often with -nje/-će nominalisations than with -cija forms. By contrast, plural forms are proportionally more frequent among -cija nominalisations, supporting the view that this class is more strongly lexicalised and more fully integrated into the nominal domain. Finally, most tokens show morphological correspondence with standard Serbian, although the data also leave room for further investigation of dialect-specific derivational patterns. The study contributes to research on deverbal nominalisation in South Slavic by extending the empirical basis to a non-standard Balkan Slavic variety and to spontaneous spoken-language data.

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