Future iused to denote habitual actions in the vernacular of the Sirinić Župa in the northern Šar Mountains

Abstract

This paper analyzes the use of Future I to denote habitual actions in the vernacular of Sirinić. The analysis shows that Future I is a high-frequency unit when it refers to effects of what happened in the past as a custom, habit or part of a sequence. The use of Future with this meaning developed as its secondary trait, but this form was eventually suppressed from other domains of use and it was narrowed down to denoting a habitual action. The basic syntactic and semantic features of this future form with this time reference are its reference to a repeated action or a succession of events and its ability to denote the timeline of the effects of the action and its reference to wishes and commands more clearly. Furthermore, a future referring to the past is stylistically marked and thus appears as an expressive unit within the system, which is why it is typical of emotional discourse. In the Shtokavian area, Future I for habitual actions is only known in the Sirinić vernacular and in a few neighboring ones concentrated around the Šar Mountains. On the other hand, this unit is also frequent in Macedonian and Bulgarian and in some non-Slavic languages spoken in the Balkans, which is why the authors also investigate the presence of this feature in those languages. [Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 178020: Dijalektološka istraživanja srpskog jezičkog prostora]

Keywords

• dialectology
• Sirinić
• Future I
• habituality
• Balkanism