PREDICTABLE ERRORS IN SERBIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Abstract

This paper compares the written production of students learning Serbian as a foreign language with utterances of children at an early age acquiring Serbian as a first language. In one part of the corpus – the one compared – there are errors in essays by a linguistically heterogeneous group of students who attended an intensive course in Serbian at A1 and A2 levels of knowledge in the Centre for Serbian as a Foreign Language (within the Department of Serbian Language and Linguistics) at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad. The other part of the corpus – the one the first part is compared with – there are deviations from the standard Serbian language revealed in papers dedicated to the acquisition of Serbian and speech development of children at an early age (one to three years old). By means of comparison, common morphological and syntactic deviations from the standard Serbian norm have been determined and singled out (deviations: 1. in the creation of verb forms, 2. in congruence between the subject and predicate as well as 3. in the use of prepositional-case constructions with verbs) with the aim of showing which students’ errors occur under the influence of the target language itself, i.e. due to intralingual interference. The result of the analysis is a list of the total 43 types and subtypes of errors common for the two groups of respondents, which further leads to the conclusion that the singled out students’ errors can be considered intralinguistic ones. It is established that the total sum of examples by students is 38.1% of their whole corpus in the three observed grammar segments.