Identifying and Supplementary Relatives

To strengthen your grasp of advanced Serbian syntax, it is vital to understand how semantic restrictiveness interacts with relativizers and orthography.

1. Restrictive vs. Non-Restrictive Relatives
• Restrictive clauses (restriktivne or odredbene rečenice) narrow down the set of entities represented by the antecedent noun. If removed, the core truth value or definition of the noun phrase is altered or incomplete. Under Serbian orthography (Pravopis), these clauses take no comma when placed in their canonical position immediately following the antecedent noun.
• Supplementary clauses (nerestriktivne or apozitivne rečenice) behave syntactically like an apposition (names and apposition). They add descriptive or parenthetical information about an entity whose identity is already clear (such as a unique entity, generic class, or proper noun). They must be bracketed by commas and spoken with parenthetical intonation.

2. Semantic Contrast Through Punctuation
Because relative clauses with који can be either restrictive or non-restrictive, the presence or absence of a comma in post-nominal position is contrastive:
• Радници који су завршили посао отишли су. = Only those specific workers who finished left.
• Радници, који су завршили посао, отишли су. = The workers, who had finished the work, left (referring to the whole established group of workers, adding a parenthetical fact about them; while context often invites a circumstantial or causal inference, the syntax itself simply denotes supplementary predication).

3. The Syntax and Distribution of што vs. који
• Који is a fully declinable relative pronoun. It agrees with its antecedent in gender and number, while its case reflects its syntactic role inside the subordinate clause. It directly fronts prepositions (човек са којим радим). Resumptive clitics with који are strictly ungrammatical. In addition, standard Serbian requires inflected relative pronouns like који (or possessive relative clauses like чији) and strictly rejects invariant што for non-restrictive appositive clauses modifying proper nouns (Петар, који живи у Нишу..., never *Петар, што живи у Нишу...).
• Relative што behaves in two distinct ways depending on whether its antecedent is a lexical noun or an indefinite/demonstrative neuter pronoun:
1) Neuter correlative pronouns: After neuter pronouns such as све, нешто, ништа, or the one who and what (оно, то), што is standardly required (never *које). In the nominative and inanimate accusative, it appears as што (све што знам, оно што видим). However, when governed by prepositions or oblique case roles, it is not invariant—it declines using oblique forms of asking about things in oblique cases (све о чему говоримо, оно чиме се поносимо, свега чега се сећам).
2) Invariant complementizer што with nominal antecedents: When modifying a lexical noun (e.g. човек, жена, књига), што is strictly invariable across genders and numbers. Its syntactic roles are expressed via resumptive clitics or zero-marking:
— Subject relativization: When relativizing a nominative subject, no resumptive pronoun is used (човек што ради овде, never *човек што он ради овде).
— Object and oblique relativization: For direct objects, clitics (short accusative pronouns) are obligatory with animate antecedents (човек што га познајемо), but optional and commonly omitted with inanimate nouns (both књига што сам је прочитао and књига што сам прочитао). For all indirect objects and non-prepositional oblique arguments, resumptive clitics are mandatory, such as short dative pronouns (жена што сам јој помогао) or genitive clitics (писац што га се сви сећају).
— Prepositional arguments: In standard written Serbian, attempting to relativize prepositional arguments with invariant што plus a preposition and stressed pronoun (*човек што радим са њим) is colloquial; standard syntax strictly requires prepositional fronting with који (човек са којим радим).
• Sentential Relatives: When the relative clause refers back to the entire preceding proposition rather than a single noun, standard Serbian obligatorily uses што preceded by a comma, never које: Сви су дошли, што је одлично.