Agency in Formal Writing

In Serbian formal writing, demoting or suppressing the agent (вршилац радње) serves specific stylistic and pragmatic functions: institutional impartiality, objectivity, legal detachment, and avoidance of individual accountability.

Passivization operates across two fundamental structural categories based on whether a nominative subject is present:

• Personal Passive (лични / прави пасив): Strictly requires a grammatical nominative subject promoted from an underlying accusative object, controlling gender and number agreement on the predicate.
• Impersonal Passive (безлични пасив / обезличене реченице): Operates without a nominative subject, suppressing the agent from intransitive verbs, verbs with prepositional/oblique complements, or transitive verbs used absolutely without a direct object (e.g., Овде се добро једе и пије). The predicate appears in the 3rd person singular, with neuter singular agreement appearing specifically in compound forms containing a participle. Importantly, standard Serbian strictly prohibits combining reflexive passive се with an accusative direct object (*Књигу се чита is ungrammatical; standard syntax requires nominative promotion: Књига се чита).

Personal passivization operates along two primary morphosyntactic tracks governed by verb aspect and tense:

• Participial Passive (придевски / партиципски пасив): Formed with the passive participle (трпни глаголски придев) and the verb бити, which functions as an auxiliary verb (помоћни глагол) in compound verbal tenses, but as a copula (спона / копула) in statal passives. With perfective verbs, it denotes completed actions or resultant states (e.g., Закон је усвојен). With imperfective verbs, it forms the passive past tense denoting durative, iterative, or habitual past events (e.g., Кућа је грађена годину дана; Више пута је упозораван). Morphosyntactically, је + passive participle cannot express an ongoing present action; while iterative forms with бивати exist, they are archaic in contemporary prose. To convey an ongoing action in the present, modern Serbian relies on the reflexive passive.
• Reflexive Passive (повратни / се-пасив): Formed with a transitive verb and the clitic се, where the semantic patient is promoted to the nominative grammatical subject and controls verb agreement (e.g., Обрасци се предају на шалтеру). In the present tense, it pairs primarily with imperfective verbs to denote current processes, regular procedures, or institutional rules. Perfective verbs regularly appear with се in passive clauses with future reference (e.g., Испит ће се одржати у петак) or subordinate clauses where the promoted subject controls agreement (e.g., Циљ је да се питање успешно реши).

Impersonal Passives and De-agentivized Constructions (Безлични пасив и обезличавање):
Alongside personal passives, formal discourse frequently relies on impersonal passive and de-agentivized clauses to hide agency completely, taking a 3rd person singular predicate (with neuter agreement on participles in compound forms):

• Impersonal Participial Passive: Formed with an invariant neuter participle with auxiliary је, used with transitive or intransitive verbs where no subject is promoted (e.g., О томе је одлучено на седници; Пуцано је на зграду; Констатовано је да...).
• Impersonal Passive with се: Using безлично се with modal or lexical verbs without a nominative subject, conveying general procedural obligations or past deliberations (e.g., мора се нагласити; О томе се дуго расправљало; О томе се сада говори).

Handling the Demoted Agent:
Serbian strongly avoids overt animate agents in passive clauses. A crucial grammatical constraint is that human/animate agents can never appear in the bare instrumental (*Књига је написана писцем is strictly ungrammatical). Only natural forces and inanimate causes take the bare instrumental (Град је уништен земљотресом). While the bureaucratic calque од стране + Genitive appears in statutory and administrative texts to resolve legal ambiguities in participial passives (e.g., Уговор је потписан од стране директора), it is stylistically discouraged in standard prose. Crucially, од стране is strictly ungrammatical in reflexive се passives (*Закон се усваја од стране скупштине). When the human agent is known, good Serbian style prefers an active clause with topicalized word order (OVS): Уговор је потписао директор.