A note on epistemic and effective meanings of the Polish perfective and imperfective (original) (raw)
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The aim of this paper is to present a typology of Polish imperfective past tense forms in the factual use for the purpose of creating a set of guidelines for their translation into French language. Although descriptions of factual imperfective aspect are not new to linguistics, both Polish and international, equivalence of its forms in other languages poses problems to foreigners and native speakers alike. This is especially true in French, where Polish past imperfective forms could be expressed by a number of past tenses. In order to proceed with our task we are going to adopt a classification of Polish imperfective verbal forms based on the following criteria: general factual meaning or specific (concrete) factual meaning as a primary measure and imperfective or perfective intention of the imperfective form as a secondary measure. Such systematization of the phenomenon in Polish will allow us to formulate guidelines of equivalence with French past tenses.
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Acta Linguistica Academica, 2018
This paper is a contribution to a long-standing discussion related to the domain of aspectual interpretation. More precisely, it focuses on the impact of the degree of specificity and morphological complexity on the time course of processing of perfective (prefixed perfective and semelfactive perfective) and imperfective (simple imperfective and iterative imperfective) verbs in Polish. In two experiments, eye-tracking during reading and self-paced reading, we tested a hypothesis based on Frisson & Pickering (1999), Pickering & Frisson (2001), and Frisson (2009) that the interpretation of semantically underspecified verbs should be delayed to the end of a sentence. As predicted, in both of the reported experiments significantly longer reading measures were observed for aspectually underspecified simple imperfective verbs as compared to aspectually more specific perfective verbs in the sentence-final region. Our second major prediction was that morphological complexity of aspectual fo...
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This study aims to account for the microvariation in aspect choices in factual imperfective contexts in Polish. To this goal an online questionnaire was conducted in which the participants from western and eastern Poland were asked to fill in the missing verbs in presuppositional and existential factual contexts involving an Elaboration coherence relation. The study shows that perfective aspect is preferred in presuppositional factual contexts and imperfective is preferred in existential factual contexts in both regions. Additionally, imperfective is generally more often used in factual contexts in eastern Poland than in western Poland. The study accounts for the observed preferences by resorting to the interaction between the Elaboration relation and (in)definiteness of the temporal variable (introduced at the level of AspP) with respect to the temporal trace of a complex event decomposed in the first phase syntax.
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This paper analyzes the syntax of perfective auxiliaries in Polish, which may assume two syntactic positions: they may follow the clause-initial word as Wackernagel clitics, or they can be affixed onto the participle. The traditional assumption made in the literature is that the variation is due to a diachronic reinterpretation of their morphological status, and that the affixed form is an innovation. This paper investigates the distribution of Polish auxiliaries in a broader Slavic perspective and argues that the observed variation does not exemplify a language change, but rather it involves two independent syntactic processes: one of them is related to auxiliary affixation; the other one, inherited from Old Church Slavonic, is a case of second position cliticization that marks the Illocutionary Force of a clause.
The status of secondary imperfectivization in Polish: Evidence from VP idioms 1
This paper offers new insights into the status of secondary imperfective morphology and its interaction with different classes of aspectual affixes based on the analysis of their compatibility with basic perfective and basic imperfective VP idioms in Polish. We provide new evidence in favor of the vP-external status of secondary imperfective morphology and we propose a new architecture of aspectual morphology in Polish in which there are two classes of vP-external superlexical prefixes: high and low. The former are projected in several functional projections above secondary imperfective morphology while the latter are projected below it in a single dedicated functional projection. Additionally, we provide new evidence that a semelfactive morpheme in Polish is realized vP-internally. We argue that it acts as a verbalizer projected in the head of vP. Concerning the computation of aspectual meaning, inspired by earlier claims made for Russian, we argue that in Polish one should separate morphological derivation of perfective and imperfective verbs from their aspectual interpretation with the former happening earlier during the derivation and the latter taking place later at the level of AspP where IMP/PERF null operators are computed on the basis of the information provided by the highest aspectual morpheme in the hierarchy.
How incremental is the processing of perfective and imperfective aspect in Polish
Journal of Slavic Linguistics, 2020
The present paper reports two ERP experiments in Polish which examined the processing of mismatches between perfective and imperfective verbs and temporal modifiers which preceded the VP (Experiment 1) and followed it (Experiment 2). The mismatch between perfective verb and a preceding durative adverbial elicited an N400 on the object. No ERP effect was found for the analogous mismatch between imperfective verbs and a preceding time-span adverbial. The mismatching temporal adverbial elicited an early positivity (potentially an early P600) when it followed a perfective VP and a LAN when it followed an imperfective VP. The results suggest that: (i) the domain of aspectual interpretation in Polish is a VP; (ii) mismatches with perfective and imperfective verbs are resolved differently depending on the degree of their semantic specificity (only semantically underspecified imperfective verbs can be easily adjusted to the requirements of the preceding context); (iii) the position of the temporal adverbial plays a role in that a preverbal adverbials sets up a frame within which the eventuality should be interpreted and the aspectual value computed on AspP can be potentially adjusted to it (semantic integration reflected in N400) whereas a postverbal adverbial must agree with the aspectual value already computed on AspP (syntactic integration reflected in an early positivity or a LAN). Keywords: processing of aspectual mismatches, perfective and imperfective aspect, Polish, domain of aspectual interpretation, semantic (un)specificity, ERPs 2
The perfective aspect in English and Portuguese. A contrastive study on semantic basis
1980
An exam of the occurrences of the PRESENT PERFECT in English was made in such a way as to establish the prevailing semantic features of this verbal form. It was verified up to what an extent the meaning of the PERFECTIVE thus characterized is expressed in the corresponding Portuguese sentences in the PRETÉRITO PERFEITO. It was found that in Portuguese the verbal inflexion itself characterizes in a much smaller degree the PER-FECTIVE ASPECT.
Journal of Slavic Linguistics, Vol. 28(1), pp. 23–69, 2020
The present paper reports two ERP experiments in Polish that examined the processing of mismatches between perfective and imperfective verbs and temporal modifiers, which preceded the VP (Experiment 1) and followed it (Experiment 2). The mismatch between perfective verb and a preceding durative adverbial elicited an N400 on the object. No ERP effect was found for the analogous mismatch between imperfective verbs and a preceding time-span adverbial. The mismatching temporal adverbial elicited an early positivity (potentially an early P600) when it followed a per-fective VP and a LAN when it followed an imperfective VP. The results suggest that: (i) the domain of aspectual interpretation in Polish is a VP; (ii) mismatches with perfec-tive and imperfective verbs are resolved differently depending on the degree of their semantic specificity (only semantically underspecified imperfective verbs can be easily adjusted to the requirements of the preceding context); (iii) the position of the temporal adverbial plays a role in that a preverbal adverbial sets up a frame within which the eventuality should be interpreted and the aspectual value computed on AspP can be potentially adjusted to it (semantic integration reflected in N400), whereas a post-verbal adverbial must agree with the aspectual value already computed on AspP (syn-tactic integration reflected in an early positivity or a LAN).