Baroque sentence geometry in the play Nevinost ili Svetislav i Mileva (1827) (Innocence or Svetislav and Mileva) by Jovan Sterija Popović

A syntactic organization in the play Nevinost Ili Svetislav i Mileva (1827) (Innocence or Svetislav and Mileva) by Jovan Sterija Popović is far away from the present day holders of the standard Serbian language. Sterija's sentences succumbed to baroqueization, which came to the Serbian language through the Russian language, and from the German and Latin syntax. The paper will analyze the Baroque features of the Sterija's language, which are reflected above all in the following: the finalization of the verb in the predicate and the finalization of the infinitive, the contradictions that divide the multiple sentence constituents, the post-position of the attribute in relation to the noun, the pre-position of genitive, adjectives and other provisions, syntax parallelism and the standard decoration of the Baroque sentence in the form of numerous exclamations, exclamation sentences and vocatives. The goal is to point to the baroque of Jovan Sterija Popović's language by registering appropriate stylistic features. All the required Baroque features are present in the Sterija's language. The research has shown that the characteristics of Sterija's syntax do not differ much from the registered phenomena in studies on the language by Jovan Hadžić and Jovan Subotić. In the novels Dejan and Damjanka (1830) these baroque phenomena are common, which shows that Sterija retains the stylistic and syntactic characteristics of the Baroque epoch independently of the genre. The most prominent Baroque features in the language of Jovan Sterija Popović are those that are dominant amongst other writers of the 19th century.