An aspectual classification of polish verbs

2008

This paper offers new insights into the status of secondary imperfective morphology and its interaction with different classes of aspectual affixes based on the analysis of their compatibility with basic perfective and basic imperfective VP idioms in Polish. We provide new evidence in favor of the vP-external status of secondary imperfective morphology and we propose a new architecture of aspectual morphology in Polish in which there are two classes of vP-external superlexical prefixes: high and low. The former are projected in several functional projections above secondary imperfective morphology while the latter are projected below it in a single dedicated functional projection. Additionally, we provide new evidence that a semelfactive morpheme in Polish is realized vP-internally. We argue that it acts as a verbalizer projected in the head of vP. Concerning the computation of aspectual meaning, inspired by earlier claims made for Russian, we argue that in Polish one should separate morphological derivation of perfective and imperfective verbs from their aspectual interpretation with the former happening earlier during the derivation and the latter taking place later at the level of AspP where IMP/PERF null operators are computed on the basis of the information provided by the highest aspectual morpheme in the hierarchy.

Polonica 43, 2023

This article addresses the connection between aspect, actionality and modality, and it investigates biases in modal interpretations of aspect choice for infinitives under the scope of possibility modals. Samples from the Polish National Corpus provide an empirically testable ground towards answering the question whether such biases are motivated by aspect or rather by actionality. Negation with ipfv. infinitives shows a considerable bias for deontic readings, while pfv. infinitives clearly favor circumstantial (‘dynamic’) readings irrespective of negation. The basic split amounts to a distinction between deontic and circumstantial (not deontic vs epistemic) readings. The study underlines the importance of not confusing aspect with a/telicity distinctions or other features relevant for actionality.

2012

In good dictionaries of Slavic languages verbal aspect is generally indicated in the same way as the gender of nouns: (usually) labels or such like provide the information whether a verb is perfective or imperfective and especially nowadays also whether two verbs with the same lexical meaning that differ only in aspect form a so-called aspectual pair. This state of affairs does not actually do justice to the many significant but often ‘regular’ variations that occur in association with aspect. In particular, with respect to imperfective verbs, there are a - albeit, not so great - number of meaning variations that may be seen to systematically occur depending on the lexical meaning of verbs in combination with aspectual meaning. The question is whether that should be pointed out in a dictionary. In order to shed some light on this matter I will give an overview of the treatment of aspect by (all) Polish monolingual dictionaries whilst sometimes sidestepping to special issues appertai...

Formal Approaches to Number in Slavic and Beyond, ed. Mojmír Dočekal and Marcin Wągiel. To be published in the Open Slavic Linguistics series by Language Science Press, 2021., 2021

Languages differ in the range of readings of imperfective aspect but its single ongoing and plural event readings are cross-linguistically licensed. In this study we focus on the role of the number of NP objects on the disambiguation of Polish imperfective verbs. The crucial observation is that a singular object may block whereas a plural NP object creates a strong preference for the plural event reading of imperfective verbs. However, in the right context, the plural event reading of imperfective verbs is also available with singular NP objects. In order to account for these observations, we combine underspecification and number approaches to imperfective aspect and we propose that imperfective is underspecified for number and this information is specified via a coercion template mainly on the basis of the number semantics of nominal objects of imperfective verbs.

Meta-Informative Centering in Utterances - Between Semantics and Pragmatics, Companion Series in Linguistics N°143, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 306 p., 2013

The main function of the linguistic category of aspect is perfectly reflected by the traditional term “aspect” or “view” which means that the speaker chooses a view of the situation s/he is speaking about. This view of a situation, or “point of view”, is first of all reflected by an internal analysis of the situation into parts: moments and stages. This necessary choice can be compared to that of a centre of attention in order to build an utterance (cf. the definition of subject and object in Chapter 4 in this volume). As such, aspect is an essential tool of the meta-informative structure of the utterance. The internal view of the situation is further completed by external view parameters concerning its repetition, the modification of its flow or intensity, the composition of several situations into one complex situation. This approach aims at integrating into a cohesive whole the great variety of uses described in the huge literature on verbal aspect in Slavic languages. The ASMIC theory is of great help in dealing with the blurred borderline between semantics and pragmatics in aspect usage, making it possible to propose some tentative way out of endless debates on Slavic aspectology: the problem of aspect pairs, the difference between aspect and Aktionsart, the amazing differences in the use of imperfective (IPF) verbs in Slavic languages and the use of the imperfect tense in French or progressive forms in English, etc. By reference to the three sorts of parameters we have defined (concerning situation types, situation internal and external view) we can distinguish precisely the different possible semantic types of perfective (PF) partners that can be derived from a simple IPF verb in Slavic languages depending on the type of semantic situation to which the simple verb refers (in a given context). The reference to the different values of the aspect parameters also makes it possible to distinguish among derived PF verbs those which can be considered as pertaining to grammatical aspect, as opposed to the lexical classes of derived verbs formed with prefixes having not only an aspectual perfectivising meaning but adding also various (spatial or abstract) meanings to the root verb.

Journal of Slavic linguistics, 2022

Japanese Slavic and East European Studies

classification of English verbs (Vendler 1967), and a semantic typology of Russian predicates (Seliverstova (ed.) 1982).2 In this article, we would like to analyze a correlation between the universal ontological basis of distinguishing aspectual classes of verbs, which reflect characteristics of named actions in reality, and a language-specific interpretation of this basis in the Russian and Japanese languages. Here, we find it important to note that diEferences in semantically distinguished properties of verbal aspectual classes are systematically conditioned and related to the key ideas of the Russian and Japanese language world-construal, i.e., it appears also in contiguous fields of the language system-in morphology, word formation, semantics, and the usage ofverbs. 2. Interpretation and fragmentation of reality in language world-construal Diffbrences in the way of interpreting dynamic situations between languages concern, first of all, dififerent ways of separating a fragment of reality present in the sight of a speaker, the choice of diffbrent semantic properties fbr its nomination, and also linguistic devices for its expression. Let us illustrate our thesis by the fbllowing examples. The JapaneseSociety forSlavic and East European Studies Aspectual classes ofverbs: universal and idioethnic features (Russian and Japanese) The Aspectual classes ofverbs: universal and idioethnic features (Russian and Japanese)

2010

Polish in the light of grammaticalization theoryThe paper is concerned with grammaticalization, a type of language change whereby lexical items, in specifi contexts, come to serve grammatical functions, and grammatical items acquire new grammatical functions. The aim is twofold: to shed light at the main properties of grammaticalization, and to demonstrate its applicability to Polish data. Some prominent examples in Polish are discussed: the grammaticalization of modals, imperative and avertive constructions. The paper closes with a non-exhaustive list of leads for further research into grammaticalization in Polish.

Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, 2017

The present paper evaluates Fukuda's (2007a, 2008) Functional Head Analysis of aspectual verbs on the basis of the analysis of aspectual verbs in Romanian with focus on whether they induce restructuring, whether they occupy functional projections, and whether the structural position which they occupy is reflected in their control and/or raising behaviour. The data indicates that Romanian aspectual verbs behave like lexical verbs. They merge in the same syntactic position, irrespective of the complement which they select and which can be uniformly analysed as ModP/FinP. Their control or raising behaviour is not correlated with different syntactic positions.

The paper continues and updates former analyses of the author, concentrated mainly on the situation in Czech, but also analysing various situations in other Slavic languages. The conclusion supports Bernard Comrie’s interpretation of the perfective (dokonavý) aspect as ‘marked’, perhaps better defined as a ‘verbal definite article’, whereas the stronger and stronger Czech iterative as also ‘marked’, but as a ‘verbal indefinite article’. A verbal prefix has two functions: grammatical (turns an imperfective into a perfective verb), and lexical (changes the meaning of the verb, in this case the change may be none or null).

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.

Klimek-Jankowska, D., Błaszczak, J. The interaction of idioms and aspect in Polish. Nat Lang Linguist Theory (2023). , 2023

This study contributes to a longstanding discussion on the status of aspectual morphology and the aspectual architecture in Slavic by investigating aspectual properties of perfective and imperfective VP idioms in Polish. The investigation reveals that only lexical prefixes which can result in idiosyncratic meanings are part of basic perfective VP idioms. Building on the idea that little v is a demarcation line for idiomatic meanings, it is concluded that lexical prefixes are vP-internal. It is also shown that basic imperfective VP idioms are compatible with some superlexical prefixes and basic perfective VP idioms are compatible with secondary imperfective morphology, which suggests that such morphology is vP-external. Further semantic analysis of the interaction of basic imperfective VP idioms with different classes of superlexical prefixes shows that the compatible ones measure over some scale associated with vP-external material or the temporal trace of an (idiomatic) event. In contrast, the incompatible ones measure over a scale encoded by a verbal predicate or impose semantic restrictions on its argument and hence they intervene in the semantics of a VP idiom. Based on stacking facts and the interaction of different classes of superlexical prefixes with secondary imperfective morphology, two classes of superlexical prefixes are distinguished: high (projected above secondary imperfective) and low (projected below it). These observations are compatible with the view that aspectual morphology is separated from PFV and IPFV operators. The former may merge lower in the hierarchy, and the latter act at the level of AspP as phonologically null operators.

In: Ukrainska Polonistyka 19(2021), Zhitomir - Bydgoszcz (Ukraine-Poland) pp 3-12, 2021

The present paper deals with two universal linguistic phenomena, homeostasis and compensation. The author examines their function in relation to two categories, aspect and tense in the history of the Slavic languages. It is beyond doubt that one of the most important categories of the Slavic verb is aspect the origin of which may lie in the Proto-Indo-European language. The effects of its emergence as a verbal category were far-reaching and can be well traced in the history of the most Slavic languages. Taking a close look to the linguistic data, it seems quite obvious that the categories of tense and aspect were closely related and did interact, creating different patterns in modern Slavic languages. A certain competition between the category of aspect and that of tense can already be observed in Old Slavic and also in Old Russian and Old Polish where tenses like the aorist and the imperfect were becoming increasingly obsolete. The perfect, on the contrary, has gained ground, while the pluperfect has almost completely fallen into disuse. In the further development, the aspectual opposition also extended to the future tenses thereby affecting the entire tense system. This scenario took place everywhere in the East and West Slavic languages with some nuanced differences. Consequently, in the aspect-tense system of the modern East and West Slavic languages the tendency of the category of aspect to prevail over the category of tense together with the gradual decline in the number of tenses seems to be quite clear. The South Slavic languages, however, have taken a slightly different path showing perhaps the most complex picture. Although the Serbian and Croatian languages have preserved the old tenses, their use is rather limited. In terms of their aspectual development, these languages are getting closer and closer to the Eastern and Western Slavic language groups. In contrast, in Bulgarian and Macedonian one can see an intricate interplay of the aspectual system and the developed tense system. In the case of the change of the different Slavic languages, the phenomenon of linguistic compensation can be observed in all cases on the example of aspect and tense categories as the main means of striving to maintain linguistic homeostasis.