A Model for Presentation of Italian Prepositions Expressing Cause and Serbian Cases in Didactic Material

The aim of this paper is to propose a model for a didactic representation of Italian prepositions and their Serbian equivalents that could facilitate 1. the comprehension and acquisition of Italian prepositions by Serbian learners of L2 Italian, and 2. possibly also the comprehension and acquisition of Serbian cases by Italian learners of L2 Serbian. Italian prepositional constructions and Serbian morphological cases may express the same syntactic and semantic functions. Taken separately, both Italian prepositions and Serbian cases have been studied in great detail and in depth, not only from the point of view of inflectional morphology, but also from syntactic and semantic perspectives. However, the functions that these categories perform in the two languages have to date been compared only sporadically and in very general terms, without any attempts of a systematic and exhaustive contrastive analysis. Additionally, the authors of didactic materials intended for Serbian speakers learning Italian, as well as Italian speakers learning Serbian as an L2, often do not pay sufficient attention to a contrastive representation of Italian prepositions and Serbian cases. For this reason, they still represent one of the most frequent error types during the process of acquisition of the languages in question. Therefore, this paper compares the Italian prepositional constructions consisting of simple prepositions followed by nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs on one side, and their Serbian equivalents on the other side, by means of contrastive analysis methods. The results of our analysis could be applied in the creation of grammars, dictionaries, textbooks, and additional didactic materials for L2 Italian for Serbian learners and for L2 Serbian for Italian learners.