The Slavic imperfect (original) (raw)
Related papers
Imperfectivization can be understood in two different ways that should be thoroughly distinguished. The first corresponds to morphological imperfectivization, i.e. the derivation of an imperfective verb from a perfective one by the addition of a suffix. The second meaning of the discussed term corresponds to "obligatory imperfectivization", i.e. a more general functional mechanism that forces the speaker to replace any perfective verb with an imperfective partner in contexts where perfective verbs are not allowed. The notions of aspectual correlation as opposed to that of aspectual partnership are discussed; a functional analysis of "aspectual trios" is proposed.
2013. On the Origin of the Slavic Aspects: Aorist and Imperfect
This chapter presents a sketch of the prehistorical development of the Common Slavic preterital imperfect/aorist category. The methods of internal analysis and linguistic geography are applied to mostly well established data in order to reconstruct major elements of this development, in particular the relative chronology of the main morphological changes, correlations with well-known Common Slavic phonological changes, as well as correlations of regional morphological differences with major phonological isoglosses. The results contribute to our understanding of the development of Common Slavic and its dialectal differentiation in the period of the "Slavic migrations". 1
Fake imperfective imperatives in Slavic
Oslo Studies in Language, 2014
This paper is based on a comparative corpus study of aspect use in Slavic imperatives. Two important findings in this study are, first, that there is a cross-Slavic variation in aspect use, and second, that IPF is strikingly widespread. I argue that both findings are connected to the phenomenon of aspectual competition and the fact that the Slavic languages resolve cases of aspectual competition in different ways.
2016: The Perfect from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective in Old East Slavic Texts.
In this article it is made use of a cross-linguistic conception of the category of perfect, as being marked morphologically as periphrastic and semantically involving two temporal planes. An analysis is undertaken to show how the Old East Slavic perfect shaded into several meanings, opening up for the gradual replacement of the imperfect and the aorist by the perfect in terms of the l-participle. This process in Russian led to a single preterit based on a nominal form declined for the categories of gender and number, but not for the category of person.
Delimitatives, diminutive-iteratives and the secondary imperfective in North Slavic
This paper is concerned with diminutive-iterative verbs, delimitative verbs with prefix po-and the secondary imperfective suffix. It is argued that diminutive-iterative po-verbs are derivationally based on delimitative predicates. Further, the secondary imperfective suffix is not an undifferentiated element. It is argued that the two instances of the imperfectivizing suffix-the iterative one and the progressive one-merge in distinct structural positions and that the delimitative prefix po-occurs between them. In the derivation of diminutive-iteratives, the delimitative po-selects a predicate with a scalar structure and the Davidsonian event variable and contributes an extensive measure function to the base predicate. The iterative-yva-, with its pluractional semantics, then iterates the eventuality denoted by the po-predicate.