Abstract
One of the distinctive features of Slavic verbs is their aspectual morphology: typically each finite and non-finite form of a verb has a constant aspectual value: either perfective (PFV) or imperfective (IPFV). Nevertheless, in all Slavic languages, besides these prototypical verbs with only one assigned aspectual value, there are also verbs with underspecified aspectual value, usually called biaspectual verbs (BVs).As argued in the literature, on the sentence level such verbs have the potential to express both aspectual values, PFV and IPFV, without any further aspectual affixation. However, some scholars assert that the intended aspectual value of such verbs can rarely be unambiguously signaled. To resolve the ambiguous aspectual value, native speakers often provide additional context signals or derive a new aspectually defined verb to indicate the intended aspectual value. The latter possibility has been addressed in numerous papers, but mainly with the goal of detecting the (most common) prefixes used in this process.This study aimed to examine the patterns behind BV prefixation in Croatian. In order to detect factors with a statistically significant impact on prefixation of BVs in Croatian, a random stratified sample of 237 Croatian BVs (BVs of Slavic origin and biaspectual borrowings) was compiled. The data regarding the existence of perfective derivatives were extracted from three different corpora of contemporary Croatian and one subcorpus: the Croatian National Corpus, the Croatian Language Repository, and the Croatian Web Corpus and its subcorpus Forum, and afterwards analyzed using R software with the help of the lme4 package.The results obtained with the generalized linear mixed model revealed five factors statistically significant for prefixation of BVs in Croatian, which can be attributed to the lexical (semantical), morphological and sociolinguistic domains.
Highlights
As well as actionality,1 which seems to be a common feature of all languages, Slavic languages have verbal aspect as a grammatical category
Differently with respect to prefixation?”),30 existence of synchronic and/or diachronic prefixes within the base biaspectual verbs (BVs) (RQ2 “Are base BVs with a synchronically and/or diachronically distinguishable prefix less prone to prefixation than BVs that do not begin with such a prefix?”),31 and the number of meanings ascribed to the base biaspectual lemmas (RQ4 “Does the number of meanings of a base biaspectual lemma influence its prefixation?”)
To test whether the prefixation of the 237 analyzed Croatian BVs is influenced by the origin of the base biaspectual lemma, the presence of a synchronic and/or diachronic prefix within the base BV, the existence of a suffixed derivative of the base BV, the number of meanings of the base biaspectual lemma, and corpus, a generalized linear mixed regression model was designed
Summary
As well as actionality, which seems to be a common feature of all languages (cf. Breu, 1980: 115; Lehmann, 1992), Slavic languages have verbal aspect as a grammatical category. A given verb has an inherent PFV or IPFV aspect, obligatorily expressed by all finite and non-finite forms of that verb (cf Janda, 2007a: 608). Based on its actional properties the lexical meaning ‘to voluntarily let someone have something free of charge’ is morphologically coded as PFV, i.e. dati. The lexical meaning ‘prepare food on the stove or on the fire in a pot with boiled water’ is, according to its actional properties, coded as IPFV on the morphological level, i.e. kuhati. In principle every lexical meaning can be expressed with both PFV and IPFV verbs. The examples in (1) illustrate how this is done in Croatian.
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