Expressing Grammatical Meaning with Morphology: A Case Study for Russian Aspect

Abstract

Phrasal structures form the backbone of any sentence, and they provide key information about, respectively, the constituent structure of a sentence and how its meanings are to be used in achieving a communicative purpose. In addition, languages typically feature several other systems that express meaning through grammatical rather than lexical means. Examples are a tense-aspect system, which expresses information about the timing and temporal structure of events, a mood-modality system, which concerns the epistemic status and opinion of the facts reported in a sentence and a determination system,which provides information about the access status of the referent of nominal phrases.This chapter shows how such grammatical meanings are approached within the framework of Fluid Construction Grammar through a concrete example of the Russian aspect system.KeywordsLexical EntryJohn BenjaminLinguistic StructureClass IndivImperfective AspectThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.