Abstract
The subject of this paper is a contrastive analysis of nouns with the derivational suffix -ač in Serbian and nouns with the derivational suffix -er in English, the meaning of which refers to a person who performs an activity or is engaged in some occupation. The corpus was excerpted from Obratni rečnik srpskoga jezika by Miroslav Nikolić and the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. In the analysis, the excerpted nouns (215 examples from Serbian and 215 from English) are approached from the structural and semantic aspect. The aim of this research is to determine the similarities and differences in the structure of nouns for denoting persons in Serbian and English by considering the word formation, the type of derivational bases and the number of syllables of the base. We start from the hypothesis that the Serbian derivational suffix -ač is equivalent to the English -er and that they come dominantly on verbal derivational bases. The analysis shows that 44% of nouns with the derivational suffix -ač in Serbian have their equivalent ending in -er in English. There are examples that do not have the derivational suffix -er in English and correspond to Serbian nouns ending in -ač, but also vice versa. The differences are reflected in the number of suffixal morphemes for building nouns that denote persons – there are three more suffixes besides -er, while in Serbian there are seven more suffixes besides -ač. The derivational bases in English examples from the corpus are dominantly monosyllabic (58%), and in Serbian longer bases often appear (37% of examples with two syllables and 30% with three syllables). The semantics of excerpted examples in Serbian denote exclusively persons who do what the motive verb means or persons who have an occupation. In English, 48% of examples from the corpus have additional meanings such as a plant (climber), a means of transport (sleeper), an object (walker) or a device (player), etc. Based on the obtained results of the analysis, it follows that the suffixes -ač and -er are not complete equivalents in Serbian and English.
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