Syntax and semantics of the dative case

In this paper, the author presents the survey of syntactic-semantic, and, in relevant instances, also pragmatic-semantic characteristics of the dative case in the contemporary standard Serbian language. On the one hand, the existing, extensive descriptions of syntactic-semantic behavior of the dative case in large grammar books (cf. Daničić 1858; Stevanović 1979) taking into account the time when they were written - by their methodological approach and manner of presentation belong to the history of grammatical description; and, by the corpus they described, they belong to the history of the standard Serbian language. On the other hand, unlike other cases in the Serbian language, the dative case has not been monographically described so far, but it has been extensively discussed only in the confrontative research of the Russian and the Serbian language (cf. Milinković 1988). Taking into account all these facts, this paper is the author's attempt to point out to the well known characteristics of the dative case, along with some new details, presented in a different manner than before, but systematically comprehensively, clearly and, at the same time, without the extensive description of details irrelevant for the whole system. The author distinguishes eleven basic types of the dative case in the contemporary standard Serbian language. These are: the subject dative, the predicative dative, the object directive dative (that is the dative as the indirect object [the second object] and the explicative dative as the complement and at the same time, as a broadly understood, object-goal [and the single object at the same time], the possesive dative, the spatial directive dative, the instrumental dative, the causative dative, the criterion dative, the concessive dative, the ethic dative, and the dative in the speech acts of oaths and praises