SACE Stage 2 Croatian (continuers) cheat sheet

Croatian (continuers) - Stage 2 content

• Croatian has seven cases for nouns, adjectives and pronouns: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, instrumental; locative is always governed by a preposition.

• Case usage core: nominative = subject; accusative = direct object and after prepositions of motion (u, na with motion); genitive = possession, partitive, negation, and after bez, iz, od, do, kod.

• Dative marks indirect object and is used with prepositions k(a) and prema; instrumental marks means/instrument and is used with s(a); locative marks place/time only with prepositions u, na, o, po, pri.

• Verb aspect is a lexical pair: imperfective (pisati, čitati, govoriti) presents ongoing or repeated action; perfective (napisati, pročitati, reći) presents a completed whole, typically with future or past perfective forms.

• Past tense (perfekt) = clitic present of biti (sam, si, je, smo, ste, su) + past participle in -o/-la/-lo/-li/-le/-la, which agrees with the subject in gender and number.

• Future I = clitic forms of htjeti (ću, ćeš, će, ćemo, ćete, će) + infinitive (or -m construction in some dialects); future II (budem + participle) occurs in subordinate clauses after kada, ako, dok.

• Clitic order in a sentence follows the fixed slot sequence: li, auxiliaries (sam/ću/bih), dative pronouns, accusative/genitive pronouns, se/je; clitics occupy the second position in the clause.

• Conditional uses the aorist-like clitic bih, bi, bi, bismo, biste, bi + past participle; the same forms express politeness and hypothetical conditions.

• Imperative is formed from the present stem: -i (2sg), -imo (1pl), -ite (2pl); negative imperative is normally formed with nemoj/nemojte + infinitive.

• Reflexive se/ si is a clitic; se is accusative and si is dative, and many Croatian verbs are inherently reflexive (sjećati se, bojati se, smijati se).