Slavic Grammar from a Formal Perspective

1999

1999

This collection presents typological work on tense, aspect, and epistemic modality in a variety of languages and against the background of different schools of thinking, among which the St. Petersburg Typological School developed and so masterfully implemented by the Petersburg linguist, Vladimir Petrovich Nedjalkov. The volume honors this reputed scholar for his life work. It is in mainly this spirit that the following scholars have contributed to the volume: T. Tsunoda on Warrungu (Australian indigeneous language), L. Kulikov on Vedic, K. Kiryu on Japanese, Korean and Newari, N. Sumbatova on Svan (from the Kartvelian group), T.Bulygina & A. Shmelev, V. Plungian, Y. Poupynin, E. Rakhilina and G. Silnitsky on Russian, W. Boeder on Georgian, R. Thieroff on aorist and imperfect in European languages, on Russian, L. Johanson on Kipchak Turkic, I. Dolinina on Russian, N. Kozintseva on Old and Modern Eastern Armenian, Ch. Lee on Korean, W. Abraham on split ergative languages and German on Russian, on Russian, and K. Ebert on Kalmyk.

The paper discusses the phenomenon which I call 'missed tense' or 'praesens pro futuro' and which is observed in the main clause of complex sentences. When the conditional marker esli 'if' introduces an argument clause, a sort of mismatch of TAM marking can be observed between the main and the embedded predicate. If the main predicate is a predicative, the expected future tense can remain unmarked on the matrix predicate. The same is impossible for constructions with a canonical verbal head. I show that the existence of the construction results both from semantic factors (it is observed with evaluation predicates, and a situation can be evaluated even if it has not taken place in reality) and formal factors (copula constructions with predicatives differ in some respects from canonical verbal constructions).

Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 1980

Russian Language Journal, 1979

Michael К. Launer DECIPHERING CONTEXTUAL USAGE OF IMPERFECTIVE VERBS IN RUSSIAN: КОНСТАТАЦИЯ ФАКТА ДЕЙСТВИЯ AND ЗНАЧЕНИЕ ОБЩЕФАКТИЧЕСКОГО ДЕЙСТВИЯ IN NARRATIVE DISCOURSE One of the most difficult problems for students of Russian is the recognition and active use of a past tense imperfective verb form to designate a so-called "one time action" (единичное действие). Soviet grammarians, without much precision, sometimes call this use констатация факта действия or say that the verb designates an общефактическое действие. Forsyth speaks of "simple denotation." 1 KF, of course, is but one of many contextual nuances associated with imperfective verbs, and the teaching (learning) problem is part of the larger task of differentiating all these contextual nuances. This paper will attempt to describe the parameters that help one decipher imperfective usage in general and KF in particular. It will also attempt to distinguish subcategories of KF which do not overlap and to describe certain classroom techniques that have proven effective in transmitting this information to students. To illustrate some of the problems and to suggest possible solutions, I have chosen passages from a book of true detective stories, ^ the major advantage of which is that the informal narrative is couched almost exclusively in the past tense, where both aspects are used freely. The level of difficulty of the passages is beyond the capability of most students, but the intention here is to discuss techniques, not to present usable materials. Experience shows that the techniques are readily applicable to otherwise suitable materials at any level of student competence. 3 When the aspectual system is taught, attention is focused on the perfectivethe tacit assumption being that imperfective is somehow easier, or more natural, for speakers of English. Perhaps this is as it should be on the elementary level. But linguistically this cannot be true. In a privative binary opposition, such as aspect presents, the perfective as the marked member must be more predictable in usage and more precise in meaning than the imperfective. * Accordingly, it should be, and, given a reasonable presentation, it is, easier to learn to deal with perfectivity. The unmarked imperfective, on the other hand, is inherently ambiguous, and the "meaning of any specific instance of imperfective usage is contextually conditioned. 5 Emphasis will be placed here on the decoding process-on correctly interpreting KF when it is encountered in writing (or in speech). There are abundant reasons for this approach. To begin with, the student is likely to encounter KF in his reading, especially if contemporary Soviet materials are used in the curriculum, long before his productive capacity is well developed. ® In addition, 3

Oslo Studies in Language, 2010

Although konstatacija fakta is sometimes divided into various types (Glovinskaja 1982; Chaput 1990; Grønn 2003), it is often defined as "the use of the impv aspect… which refers to a single, completed action" (Glovinskaja (1989), cited in (Dickey 2000, 96)). Konstatacija fakta is puzzling since 'completion' is typically associated with the perfective aspect in other (non-Slavic) languages and not the imperfective, which like the English progressive is typically associated with 'non-completion' or 'ongoingness' (Comrie 1976). In fact, based on imperfective sentences such as (3) and (4), which provide a stark contrast to the imperfective sentence in (1), oft-cited sources such as the Russian Academy Grammar (1960) have incorrectly claimed that the semantic function of the imperfective aspect is to indicate that "the action expressed by the verb is presented in its course, in process of its performance" (Academy Grammar 1960, pp. 424, cited and translated in (Forsyth 1970, 3); see also, e.g. Zucchi (1999), where the Russian imperfective is incorrectly treated like the English progressive). (3) Smerka-l-os', Darken.IPF-PST-RFL kogda when brosi-l-i PFV.stop-PST.3P kosit'. mow.IPF.INF 'It was getting dark when they stopped mowing' (Sholoxov, Tixij Don; cited in (Forsyth 1970, 66).

Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 2021, 2023

The paper examines the so-called sequence of similar events (SSE) interpretation in Serbo-Croatian (SC), which emerges with telic predicates expressed by imperfective verbs in the presence of bare plural objects. I show that this is an interpretation that, just as in English, allows the use of both durative adverbials (DurAds) and time-span adverbials (TSAds) at the same time. I argue that TSAds, as standardly assumed, modify a telic event predicate, while DurAds merge once the predicate has been made homogeneous/atelic by the plural operator (contra MacDonald's 2008 claim that DurAds combine with telic predicates in such cases). The fact that the SSE interpretation is available in SC (or Slavic more generally) for imperfective verbs-including simple ones-suggests that in Slavic there is a syntactic projection responsible for telicity analogous to that in English, and telicity of a verbal predicate can be triggered by the quantity properties of its internal arguments.

Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The South Carolina Meeting, 2004; Editors: Steven Franks, Frank Y Gladney, Mila Tasseva-Kurktchieva; Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications, 2005

I am particularly grateful to Hans Broekhuis for long discussions over the material presented here. Moreover, I would like to thank the FASL-13 audience, Mariana Lambova, Svetoslav Marinov, Laszlo Molnarfi, Craig Thiersch, Olga Tomić, Polya Vitkova, and two anonymous reviewers for comments and/or help with the data. All mistakes are my own.

Russian Linguistics, 1992

XLinguae

Time, being a philosophical and logical category, is one of the main forms of the existence of matter. Also, time is a universal form of successive change of phenomena. From the standpoint of linguistics, the linguistic category of tense is a grammatical-lexical category with its forms and units for nouns, verbs, adjectives, numerals and adverbs. Tense as a category of personal forms of the verb and its stem is a grammatical and lexical category that is inherent in all verbs (which is the grammatical parameter of the category) and is somewhat different for each verb individually due to its formal and semantic features (which is the lexical parameter of the category). The subject of this article is tense as a lexical and grammatical category. The authors carry out a semantic, idio-stylistic and comparative analysis of the lexico-semantic field of the category of tense in Russian and English using observational methods, continuous sampling of lexical units, linguistic description and ...

12 English Grammar Architecture Charts Cognitive Approach by Metod12, 2022

60% of meanings conveyed by English grammar tenses are not recognized automatically by the Russian language. Russian translations tend to be some 30% longer than their English originals. Is there any way for us to map and systematise those discrepancies? Here is an attempt of modelling, or reconstructing the cognitive system of English native speakers imprinted in the English Tense System, as of seen by a Slavic native speaker.

2006

Russian Language Journal, 2014

ABSTRACT The article presents an analysis of semantic peculiarities of secondary imperfective verbs. The secondary imperfective verbs hold a special place within the verbal system: they significantly surpass primary 2 imperfective verbs in number, yet, strangely, have been receiving an insufficient attention from researchers. The aim of the study was to analyze the behavior of 300 secondary imperfective verbs in their compatibility with indicators of duration and completion, their ability to express progressive actions, and multiplicity imbedded in their semantics. Proceeding from the results, the author offers suggestions to solving contradictions and inconsistencies in the interpretations of the Russian verbal aspect functionality. Ключевые слова: вторичная имперфективация; длительность; актуальная длительность; многократность / итеративность; временная локализованность; точечность; терминативность; тройственная видовая оппозиция, минимальный и расширенный контекст. Key words: secondary imperfectivity; duration; progressivity; iterativity; localization in time; pointedness; terminativity; tripartite aspectual opposition; minimal and extended context.

Language, 2020

This article presents the first experimental evidence on nominal tense. Data are from Pomak, a Slavic variety that makes use of a deictic suffix for referents in the interlocutor's sphere and for past-modal reference. Forty L1-Pomak participants completed an acceptability judgment task (in Pomak) and two reaction-time experiments using auditory stimuli (in L1 Pomak and in L2 Greek). In the Pomak reaction-time experiment, in particular, participants listened to NPs with temporal reference marked either purely grammatically, with a deictic suffix, or grammatically and seman-tically/pragmatically. As predicted, responses were accurate and fast in grammatical-only items even though success rates improved for nominals that had additional semantic and pragmatic temporal reference. To conclude, our study confirms that Pomak deictic suffixes provide temporal information at the level of the NP and introduces a method that could be used to test the existence of nominal tense in other languages.