The typology of Slavic aspect: a review of the East-West Theory of Slavic aspect

Abstract

Until recently, differences between the verbal aspectual systems of the individual Slavic languages have not received much attention and data was often interpreted to hold for all Slavic languages. Only in the past decades has this situation changed and to date a number of studies comparing two or more Slavic languages have seen the light of day. Independently from each other, Barentsen and Dickey have devised theories which account for the observed differences between respective Slavic languages. Their approaches are so similar that we think it is justified to speak of a single, comprehensive theory which attributes the differences in the functioning of the systems to differences in the meaning of the perfective and imperfective aspect for the individual languages. This leads to a typology in which there is an Eastern and a Western type of Slavic verbal aspectual system, hence the name ‘East-West Theory’. In this paper, we provide a critical analysis of this theory, focusing on three context types: habitual contexts, narrative contexts and retrospective contexts. Our analysis shows that the theory adequately and convincingly explains most of the data. However, we will also demonstrate that there are still areas in which the theory needs to be developed further, and we provide some suggestions as to how this can be approached.