Истокорени придевски дублети на -скӣ: -ōнӣ у српском језику

Same-root adjective doublets ending in -skī: -ōnī in Serbian language

This paper deals with Serbian and Croatian adjectives ending in -skī and -ōnī, and adverbs formed from them, which are derived from nouns of Latin origin. Following a review of previous attitudes on their derivation, accent, mutual synonymy and interchangeability, we provide a brief opinion on the issues as an introduction to analysing their frequency. The most important departure from less recent analyses is that the suffixes are given as -ōn(ī) and -sk(ī), regardless of the typical -ījskī and -iōnī forms, which are arrived at by “going with your feeling”. The starting point for determining the frequency was the list of 111 adjective pairs of both types (and identical adverbs) obtained from the reverse dictionary Obratni rečnik srpskoga jezika. Frequencies of both types were analysed using electronic corpora of Serbian and Croatian. We found that in Serbian the “and” type of situation applies: the two types are synonymous and interchangeable, although -ōn(ī) is more common than -sk(ī). On the other hand, in Croatian, the “either/or” situation applies: though synonymous, the two types are not interchangeable, with one of the two being used consistently and -sk(ī) being drastically more common. Both of these findings confirm the impressionistic descriptions found in various grammar textbooks and usage manuals.