Abstract
Abstract This paper investigates a peculiar use of the Czech imperfective aspect in sequences of events, which does not occur in Russian and other eastern Slavic languages. It was first described by Ivančev, who suggested that imperfective verbs here have an ingressive meaning. Other authors (Křížková, Galton, Stunova) in contrast stressed that an action was described as if we were in the middle of it. Dickey coined the expression “Contextually-Conditioned Imperfective Past” (CCIP) and described the phenomenon in more detail. He also shows the connection between this phenomenon and the existence of ingressive verbs with the prefix za- in the eastern Slavic languages. This paper is based on data from the Czech National Corpus, which show that two uses of the CCIP have to be distinguished: With activity verbs the imperfective aspect is used in its normal processual meaning, whereas in the case of events the imperfective aspect has the meaning of “retardation”, which is especially characteristic of motion verbs.
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