Semantic Agreement of Aspectual Prefixes and Verbs in Serbian

Abstract

This paper looks into the idea of empty prefixes and grammatical prefixation in Serbian language. The aim of the paper is to give support to the view that aspectual prefixes in Serbian are not semantically empty and that their meaning is one of the decisive factors in the process of perfectivization even when they do not add any new semantic content to a verb. It is assumed that if prefixes have no meaning, they would be attached to verbs randomly without any effect of the verb semantics. There were two steps in the analysis: semantic classification of verbs and statistical analysis of the effect of verb semantics on the choice of prefix. The results show that the distribution of prefixes among semantic classes is not random and that semantic compatibility between a verb and a prefix is a crucial factor in the grammatical prefixation.