О МОДАЛНОМ ГЛАГОЛУ ТРЕБАТИ У ЈЕЗИКУ ДНЕВНИХ НОВИНА У РЕПУБЛИЦИ СРПСКОЈ
ON THE MODAL VERB TREBATI IN THE LANGUAGE OF DAILY NEWSPAPERS IN THE REPUBLIC OF SRPSKA

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the syntactic and semantic behaviour of the modal verb trebati (‘to need’) in contemporary standard Serbian on the basis of a corpus drawn from the daily newspapers Glas Srpske and Nezavisne novine published in the first week of June 2025. Relying on relevant grammatical and normative-linguistic literature, special attention is given to those types of constructions in which the use of the impersonal form is not recommended by the norm: (1) when trebati appears in the perfect or conditional after the subject, and (2) in relative clauses with the relative pronoun / the conjunction koji functioning as the subject. The analysis shows that journalistic style largely departs from the explicit norm. Impersonal forms of trebati frequently occur even in syntactic environments where they are normatively restricted, while personal forms, although less common, also appear in certain constructions. These deviations do not seem to be accidental errors or stylistically motivated variants, but rather stable tendencies in actual language use. The findings support the view that some prescriptive rules are not aligned with either the grammatical system or real usage, and that allowing personal forms of the modal verb trebati could contribute to greater systemic consistency and clearer codification.

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