EVENT-CANCELLING SEMANTICS OF THE ENGLISH ASPECTUALIZER START AND ITS SERBIAN EQUIVALENT KRENUTI

Abstract

The paper revisits the issue of semantic equivalency of two aspectual verbs, start and krenuti, which is proposed by xxx (2021a, 2021b). The present analysis focuses on the causative and dynamic semantic features of start and krenuti, with the aim of a contrastive analysis of the aspectual constructions headed by these two verbs. It is shown that both start and krenuti, provided that the necessary linguistic conditions are met, have the ability to “cancel” the event initiated via constructional phase modification. The conditions for such event-cancelling result from the lexical semantics of start and krenuti, as well as from the semantic co-composition on the level of the aspectual construction as a whole. The theoretical frame of the analysis is the presupposition and consequence account by A. Freed (1979). The contrastive analysis and presented theoretical conclusions are backed by a parallel corpus of 200 English and Serbian sentences compiled from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GlowBE 2013) and the Corpus of Contemporary Serbian Language (SrpKor 2013).
 Key words: aspectualizers, aspectual constructions, aspectual event, temporal structure, presupposition and consequence, event-cancelling