Imperfective Verbs Research Articles

Русский вид как морфологическая деривационная категория в контексте современных исследований видовой коррелятивности

Elena Petrukhina: Russian Aspect as a Morphological Derivational Category in the Context of Modern Linguistic Studies of Aspectual CorrelationsThe article deals with grammatical correlations of imperfect and perfect verbs in Russian in connection with modern linguistic studies, namely the lexicographical project of Julie Mende et al. “Aspect and Actionality of the Russian Verb” (ВАР- ГОС 2011), based on Volkmar Lehmann's theory and his functional approach to aspectual correlations. The cognitive corpora-based studies “Exploring Emptiness” by Laura Janda and her co-authors are discussed as well. This paper focuses on the concept of “aspectual pair”, rejected by both research teams and analyzes the importance of aspectual pairs in the organization of Russian verbal aspect as a grammatical category. It is shown that functional and semantic criteria for determining aspectual pairs do not contradict, but complement each other, and ways of integrating various methodological approaches are proposed. Russian aspect is treated as a morphological derivational category in which one aspectual form is produced from another. Aspect is closely connected with verbal word-formation, and the paper contains an analysis of those connections.

Императивы несовершенного вида на ранних этапах усвоения детьми русского языка

Kira Ivanova, Maria Voeikova: Imperfective Imperatives in Early Child Russian The article focuses on imperfective imperatives at the early stages of Russian child and child-directed speech. Its goal is to explore the factors determining the choice of aspect in the imperative. Results showed that the distribution of perfective and imperfective verb tokens in parental speech does not directly influence the percentage of perfectives and imperfectives in child language. Children acquire imperfective imperatives following some semantic patterns: the verbs of motion and body positioning occur first, followed by the verbs of manipulative activity and those aimed at drawing attention to an object. The results indicate the role of actionality in the acquisition of modal and aspectual meanings and corroborate the fact that some verb classes show different patterns of aspectual behavior.

Глагольный вид в настоящем историческом в словенском языке

AleksandraDerganc: Aspect in the Historical Present in SloveneIn the article the use of perfective resp. imperfective aspect in the historical present in Slovene is discussed. As stated in several studies describing aspectual usage in Slavic languages (e.g., Plotnikova, Derganc, Dickey, Bondarko) in Slovene in the historical present no neutralization of aspects takes place. The opposition between perfective and imperfective verbs basically remains the same as in the past tense, the perfective present describing single concluded actions and the imperfective present expressing activities and states in progress, iterativity etc. Examples of such usage in the classical historical present as well as in related cases, e. g. scenic remarks, jokes, time-tables of events are given. Special attention is paid to some examples pointed out by Dickey suggesting that – contrary to the above statement – the usage of the imperfective aspect in presenting a seqence of events is also possible in the Slovene historical present. The claim of this article is that such usage is predominantly found in modern belles lettres and remains peripheral in comparison with the “classical” historical present. Such usage can be interpreted as a figurative use of the present tense describing actions in progress at the moment of speaking.

Свойства и грамматическая репрезентация эпизодичности (временной локализованности)

Volkmar Lehmann: Properties and the Grammatical Reconstruction of EpisodicityThe paper considers episodicity as an essentially pragmatic meaning potential of verbs, as the main procedure to generate temporal coherence. Episodicity is not directly opposed to genericity (which is a property of noun phrases). Its subcategories are episodic and nonepisodic (characterising) situations, in Slavonic linguistics often called temporal (non)localisation or temporal (in)definiteness. A situation is defined as episodic if its corresponding time interval is closed and if it is localised in a closed interval together with the interval of the reference time, which itself is also a closed interval. The reference time can be either deictic (speech time), narrative (the time of processing the non-deictic verb situation), or omnitemporal (any time interval; this kind of a reference time is not addressed in the paper). By default, the intervals which correspond to perfective verbs are closed and are localised together with the reference interval in a closed interval, i.e., they are episodic by default. The progressive function of imperfective verbs by default entails episodic localisation, since an internal, closed interval (a phase) of the process denoted is profiled and coincides with the reference interval. As the episodic function of these verb forms is a default function, it can be overridden by a nonepisodic, e.g. habitual context.

Несовершенный вид и сукцессивность. К вопросу о нетривиальных контекстах в русском языке в плане прошлого

Nadezhda Zorikhina Nilsson: The Imperfective in Sequences of Events. On Nontrivial Aspectual Contexts in Russian in the PastThis article analyses a nontrivial use of the Russian imperfective aspect in sequences of events in the past. The use of this so-called “contextually-conditioned imperfective past” (Dickey 2000) is characteristic of West Slavic languages, particularly Czech and Slovak, but in the linguistic literature several cases of its use in Modern Russian have also been identified.Based on data from the Russian National Corpus, this article presents the first investigation of the range of use of this phenomenon in Modern Russian.The article claims that, in spite of the extreme rarity of the imperfective aspect in the contexts under analysis, evidence for it may be found not only in stylistically marked contexts, but in common narrative style as well.Two types of contexts are investigated in detail: a chain of events consisting of more than two verbs, and the coordinative structure, where the second verb is an imperfective one. In the first case, the occurrence of the imperfective verb can be partly explained by the communicative inappropriateness of the perfective delimitative in these contexts, and in the second case the imperfective aspect may occur due to the lack of a sharp boundary between the two actions.

Event-related brain potentials when conjugating Russian verbs: The modularity of language procedures

Within the alternative concepts of “two-system” and “single-system” language models, brain mechanisms for the generation of regular and irregular forms of Russian verbs have been studied. The evoked EEG activity was recorded in 19 channels with random alternation of different speech-morphology operations. The infinitives of imperfective verbs that belong either to the productive group (conventionally, the default, or regular, class) or to the unproductive group (conventionally, the irregular class) were presented to healthy subjects. The subjects were to produce the first-person present-time forms of these verbs. The results of the analysis of the event-related potentials (ERPs) of 22 subjects are presented. Statistically valid ERP amplitude distinctions between the verb groups are found only in latencies of 600–850 ms in the central and parietal zones of the cortex. The peak values of the irregular-verb potentials are negative in this region in relation to the peak values of the regular-verb potentials. The findings are interpreted as the effect of various complexities of mental work with verbs of different groups and do not support the hypothesis of the universality of the two-system brain mechanism for processing regular and irregular language phenomena.

On Semantic Peculiarities of Secondary Imperfective Verbs in Russian: Their In/Compatibility with the Notions of Duration and Completion

On Semantic Peculiarities of Secondary Imperfective Verbs in Russian: Their In/Compatibility with the Notions of Duration and Completion

Видовая пара и ее разные трактовки

This paper presents that aspectual pairs were given in various ways in various periods, depending on the current trends in linguistics, while the essence of semantic definition, the lexical identity of imperfective and perfective verbs did not change. The essence of the modern interpretation lies in the functional approach to the determination of aspectual pairs. On the one hand, it enlarges the notion of aspectual pairs (cf. approximate pairs, aspectual partners), on the other hand, it makes obvious that the aspect and the manners of action are tightly interrelated.

Exploring Telicity and Transitivity in Primordial Thought Language and Body Boundary Imagery

Linguistics research on 'unconscious knowledge' related to the right brain-hemisphere represents a shift from the prevalent scientific investigation of the linguistic processes of grammatical structures associated with the dominant 'verbal' left brain-hemisphere. This study explores the relationship among primordial thought language, body boundary awareness and syntactic features--i.e., telicity, perfectivity and transitivity-in autobiographical narratives of everyday and dream memories. The results showed that event descriptions with atelic predicates and intransitive structures were more frequent in dream recall than in narratives of everyday memories. Primordial thought language and body boundary awareness, however, decreased with atelic predicates and transitive structures, which might indicate both the tendency of events to describe result states, such as achievements and accomplishments, as a means to bring about an unconscious wish fulfilment and the emphasis on event arguments to be realised without the inclusion of an external object. In narratives of everyday memories, penetration imagery increased with imperfective verb forms and decreased with perfective verb forms, and emotion lexis increased with atelic predicates and transitive structures, but not in dream memories.

Eine ungewöhnliche Verwendung des Aspekts im Tschechischen – der imperfektive Aspekt in Handlungssequenzen

Abstract This paper investigates a peculiar use of the Czech imperfective aspect in sequences of events, which does not occur in Russian and other eastern Slavic languages. It was first described by Ivančev, who suggested that imperfective verbs here have an ingressive meaning. Other authors (Křížková, Galton, Stunova) in con­trast stressed that an action was described as if we were in the middle of it. Dickey coined the expression “Contextually-Conditioned Imperfective Past” (CCIP) and described the phenomenon in more detail. He also shows the connection between this phenomenon and the existence of ingressive verbs with the prefix za- in the eastern Slavic languages. This paper is based on data from the Czech National Corpus, which show that two uses of the CCIP have to be distinguished: With activity verbs the imperfective aspect is used in its normal processual meaning, whereas in the case of events the imperfective aspect has the meaning of “retardation”, which is especially characteristic of motion verbs.

See, Now They Vanish: Third-Person Perfect Auxiliaries in Old and Middle Czech

This article argues that Czech retained a semantic distinction between the expression of current relevance/emphasis and a neutral preterit in third-person compound preterit forms until the late sixteenth century. The distinction was expressed by the presence (expressing current relevance/emphasis) vs. absence (neutral preterit) of third-person auxiliaries. The hypothesis is based on data from two late fourteenth-century narratives ( Asenath and The Life of Adam and Eve ) and from letters written by or to Czech women from 1365 to 1615. The results of statistical analyses are presented as support for the hypothesis, and it is suggested that the continued distinction between current relevance/emphasis and a neutral preterit in the third person is in part responsible for the fact that the two-way use of imperfective verbs never became a major usage pattern in Czech, in contrast with Russian, where the tense system was reduced relatively early.

1419 – Language changes as an important psychopathological phenomenon of mild depression

Objective Difficulties in diagnostics of mild depressions are related to clinical interpretation of thought structure and content within depressive triad. Whereas nonverbal (motor) and affective components are similar to variations of normal sadness in healthy individuals, associative component reveals the most sensitive psychopathological finding being represented in definite language changes. Methods 124 patients and 77 healthy controls, including 35 with normal sadness reactions, were observed. Speech (superficial, deep levels, Russian language) was studied using standardized psycholinguistic procedures. Statistical data evaluation included descriptive methodics, nonparametric analysis, mathematic modeling (discriminate analysis). Results Three clinical groups were formed upon to psychopathological subtypes (anxious, asthenic-hypodynamic, melancholic mild depressions). Leading hypotymic affect correlated with content of affective component, semantics of associative component, pronounced component of depressive triad and direction of the prevailing time representation. Lexical-stylistic sublevel of speech demonstrated verbosity, narration dominated over reasoning, signs of oral speech, increased number of phraseologisms, tautologies, lexical and semantic repetitions, metaphors, comparisons, inversions, ellipsis. Lexical-grammer sublevel contained more pronouns of all types with the prevalence of personal pronouns, imperfective verbs in preferential past tense. Syntax-stylistic sublevel represented the prevalence of simple sentences (truncated, impersonal), inversive word order. Component analysis of speech demonstrated the qualitative distortion and reduction of semantic component. Disruptions in structure and semantics of speech related to the most clinically pronounced thought disorder were presented in melancholic depression. Superficial level of speech was damaged mostly in asthenic-hypodynamic depression. Speech was similar to healthy controls and demonstrated the highest among subgroups cognitive adaptability level in anxious subtype.

Fungsi Afiks Infleksi Penada Pesona, Jumlah, dan Jender pada Verba Bahasa Arab: Tinjauan dari Perspektif Morfologi Infleksi dan Derivasi

This research analyzes the function of inflectional affixes as person, number, and gender in Arabic verbs from inflectional and derivational morphological perspectives. It is a qualitative research using structural linguistic method. Based on the data analysis, the result shows that there are two systems of inflection in Arabic verbs. They are inflectional suffix and inflectional prefix. The system of inflectional suffix occurs on perfect verbs (madi) and the system of inflectional prefix occurs on imperfect verbs (mudari'). The inflections function to mark the relation of verbs and their subjects in person, number, and gender in a sentence. The existence of inflection system proves that word-order in Arabic is flexible, i.e. the position of the verbs can be before or after the subjects. In addition to that, the system of inflection also shows that morphologically Arabic is inflectional, which means that its words are formed of morphemes. Each morpheme supports the concept different grammar.

Aspects of time: Time reference and aspect production in Russian aphasic speakers

Cross-linguistic data suggest that the grammatical categories of tense and aspect are not generally impaired in individuals with aphasia (see Bastiaanse et al., 2011 for a review). Rather, and more specifically, verb forms expressing reference to the past or conveying perfective semantics are more impaired than verb forms expressing reference to the non-past (present or future) or conveying imperfective semantics, both in comprehension and production. The present study used some structural properties of Russian to systematically test the interaction of time reference and aspect in non-fluent and fluent aphasia. The Test for Assessment of Reference of Time (TART; Bastiaanse, Jonkers, & Thompson, 2008; Russian version Dragoy & Bastiaanse, 2010) was used to elicit production of four verb forms in sentence context: past perfective, non-past perfective, past imperfective and non-past imperfective. The results showed that non-past time reference had a general advantage over past time reference, all aspectual forms being collapsed. However, an interaction between time reference and aspect was found: imperfective verbs were better produced in the non-past, whereas production of perfective verbs was better preserved in the past time frame. Non-fluent and fluent aphasic speakers showed largely overlapping performance. These results demonstrated that the advantage of a particular time reference depends on aspectual characteristics of the verb. The performance of both non-fluent and fluent aphasic speakers can be

Mapping Semantic Information from FrameNet onto VALLEX

In this article, we introduce a project aimed at enhancing a valency lexicon of Czech verbs with semantic information. For this purpose, we make use of FrameNet, a semantically oriented lexical resource. At the present stage, semantic frames from FrameNet have been mapped to eight groups of verbs with various semantic and syntactic properties. The feasibility of this task has been verified by the achieved inter-annotator agreement measured on two semantically and syntactically different groups of verbs – verbs of communication and exchange (85.9% and 78.5%, respectively). Based on the upper level semantic frames from the relation of ‘Inheritance’ built in FrameNet, the verbs of these eight groups have been classified into more coherent semantic classes. Moreover, frame elements from these upper level semantic frames have been assigned to valency complementations of the verbs of the listed groups as semantic roles. As in case of semantic frames, the achieved interannotator agreement concerning assigning frame elements measured on verbs of communication and exchange has been promising (95.6% and 91.2%, respectively). As a result, 1 270 lexical units pertaining to the verbs of communication, mental action, psych verbs, social interaction, verbs of exchange, motion, transport and location (2 129 Czech verbs in total if perfective and imperfective verbs being counted separately) have been classified into syntactically and semantically coherent classes and their valency complementations have been characterized by semantic roles adopted from the FrameNet lexical database.

On the Development of the Imperfective General-Factual in Russian

This article attempts to shed light on the development of the Russian imperfective general-factual (IGF) in Russian. It argues that the Modern Russian IGF arose as an amalgam of different kinds of imperfective usage, and that there are two overall sources for the various types of the Modern Russian IGF: the original process meaning of imperfective verbs, and the assertion of the existence of one or more points in time when a situation took place expressed by the class of habitual verbs. With regard to the former, it is argued that the round-trip meaning of indeterminate and prefixed imperfective verbs of motion in Modern Russian was not original and developed from the process meaning of such verbs. It is further argued that the imperfective correlates of highly resultative verbs served as tokens in the spread of the IGF from highly resultative verbs to less obviously resultive types of verbs, such as verbs of communication. In this regard it is suggested that verbs of motion and verbs of transmission (e.g., give, present, send) played an important role in the emergence of the IGF, which began to appear more or less as we know it in the seventeenth century.

О взаимодействии перфекта и вида в литовском языке

ON THE INTERACTION OF PERFECT AND ASPECT IN LITHUANIANSummaryThis paper is concerned with the range of meanings of perfect forms determined by the aspect­ual (perfective and imperfective) value of the verb and with the relation of the meanings of perfect forms to the meanings of aspects in Lithuanian. Perfect forms „būti ‘be’ + past participle active” can render the perfect meaning proper of a previous situation with continuing relevance and the resultative meaning of a state of the deep subject resulting from a previous situation. Aspect is the major factor determining the perfect or resultative use of perfect forms. The resultative mean­ing can be rendered by the perfect form of perfective verbs exclusively, the perfect meaning being rendered by the said form of verbs of either aspect. In the perfect use, a verb retains its aspectual value. In the resultative use a verb changes its perfective value to imperfective and therefore it can function as a substitute for a missing imperfective verb in an aspect opposition.The invariant perfect meaning has a number of variants largely determined by the aspectual value of the base verb.

Aspectual Pairs in the Russian National Corpus

The status of aspectual pairs formed by prefixation, as in delat´ (imperfective):sdelat´ (perfective) ‘do’ vs. suffixation, as in peredelat´ (perfective):peredelyvat´ (imperfective) ‘redo’ is the topic of a long-standing debate in Russian linguistics. Whereas most scholars assume the same aspectual relation is present for both types of pairs, some (Isačenko, Zaliznjak, Timberlake) hypothesize that only pairs derived via suffixation are true pairs. We present empirical evidence that aspectual pairs behave the same way in terms of the distribution of their forms regardless of whether they are formed via prefixes or suffixes. We examine nearly six million verb forms from the Modern subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus and show that there are no reportable statistical differences between the distributions of forms for perfective and imperfective verbs that can be attributed to the morphology (prefixes vs. suffixes) used to derive paired verbs.

Grammatical profiles and the interaction of the lexicon with aspect, tense, and mood in Russian

Abstract We propose the “grammatical profile” as a means of probing the aspectual behavior of verbs. A grammatical profile is the relative frequency distribution of the inflected forms of a word in a corpus. The grammatical profiles of Russian verbs provide data on two crucial issues: a) the overall relationship between perfective and imperfective verbs and b) the identification of verbs that characterize various intersections of aspect, tense and mood (TAM) with lexical classes. There is a long-standing debate over whether Russian aspectual “pairs” are formed only via suffixation (the Isacenko hypothesis) or whether they are formed via both suffixation and prefixation (the traditional view). We test the Isacenko hypothesis using data on the corpus frequency of inflected forms of verbs. We find that the behavior of perfective and imperfective verbs is the same regardless of whether the aspectual relationship is marked by prefixes or suffixes; our finding thus supports the traditional view. Introspective descriptions of Russian aspect have often connected the use of particular inflectional forms with certain uses of aspect; for example, the use of imperative forms with the imperfective aspect to produce expressions that are very polite. Grammatical profiles make it possible to identify verbs that behave as outliers, presenting unusually large proportions of usage in parts of the paradigm. This analysis both gives substance to and extends previous introspective descriptions by identifying the verbs most involved in certain TAM-category interactions. On a methodological level, this study contributes to current discussions on the use of inflected forms vs. lemmas in corpus studies. Newman (Aiming low in linguistics: Low-level generalizations in corpus-based research: National Chiao Tung University, 2008) finds valuable information at the level of the inflectional form, and Gries (forthcoming) argues that inflectional forms do not necessarily provide a better basis for analysis than lemmas. We agree with them that the appropriate level of granularity is determined by both the language and the linguistic phenomenon under analysis.

The Varying Role of po- in the Grammaticalization of Slavic Aspectual Systems: Sequences of Events, Delimitatives, and German Language Contact

This article presents a comparative analysis of three interrelated phenomena: the use of imperfective verbs in sequences of events in Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, Slovene, and BCS; the use of po- delimitatives in sequences of events in East Slavic, Polish, and Bulgarian; the semantic nature of the prefix po- in the individual Slavic languages. The use of imperfective verbs in sequences of events in the western languages and the use of po- delimitatives in the eastern languages are two alternative ways of aspectually coding atelic predicates in narratives. The article makes two main arguments in this connection. The first is that the use of imperfective verbs in sequences of events in the western languages has been retained (and perhaps strengthened) due to German language contact, whereas the use of po- delimitatives for such atelic predicates represents an innovation in those languages that did not undergo significant amounts of such German language contact. The second is that the lack of the development of po- into an important perfectivizing prefix in the western languages is likewise due in part to German language contact, as po- was at various times used to calque German be- in its surface-contact and transitive meanings as well as ver- in its meaning of change of state; such calques contributed to the stabilization of po- as a lexical prefix in the western languages. The retarding effect of German language contact on the western languages whereby imperfective verbs remained acceptable in sequences of events, and po- did not become a major perfectivizing prefix, is analyzed as the result of a process of "replica preservation," as opposed to the more commonly discussed process of "replica change" described by Heine and Kuteva (2005).