ENGLISH AND SERBIAN NOMINAL FINITE AND NON-FINITE CLAUSES IN CONTRAST

Abstract

This paper explores the extent to which Serbian tertiary-level EFL students avoid using English non-finite nominal clauses. It is comprised of a theoretical part, which describes and classifies English and Serbian nominal finite and non-finite clauses with the purpose of contrasting them as regards their syntactic functions of subject and complements, and an empirical part, which presents the results of the empirical research conducted. The method used is contrastive analysis together with description and classification. The contrasting model obtained in this way leads to the conclusion that English and Serbian nominal clauses differ in the number of the specific syntactic functions they perform as well as in the variety of forms. These results were tested in the empirical research conducted with tertiary-level Serbian students of English who translated the Serbian nominal finite clauses from the questionnaire into English, divided in two groups: the experimental and the test group. The analysis of the empirical research is based on the principle of whether students used finite or non-finite nominal clauses in their translation. The results of the theoretical analysis have been confirmed by the empirical results since the students generally avoided using English nominal non-finite clauses when translating the sentences from the questionnaire.