Prepositions and Verbal Prefixes: The Case of Slavic

Tense, mood and aspect: theoretical and …, 2007

Slovene, 2023

This paper is a corpus-based study of Slavic appositional constructions. Out of material taken from seven Slavic languages, two aspects of the morphosyntax of close appositions in Slavic are considered: case concord and defi niteness marking. The fi rst section of the paper considers the factors that aff ect case concord in appositions in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Czech, Polish, Croatian, and Slovenian. Based on the data of the corpora it is shown that in all seven languages, inherent plurality and frequency of proper names signifi cantly aff ect the probability of concord being present. Moreover, it is shown that the likelihood of concord diff ers across cases, and almost all languages considered follow the case hierarchy GEN>DAT>LOC>INS.

This paper deals with differences between compositional and non-compositional prefixed verbs in Slavic. Using a paraphrase test, it classifies prefixed verbs into four categories. In the course of this, it is shown that non-compositional prefixed verbs do not form a unified class. The paper provides a syntactic and semantic analysis of the particular classes and argues that also prefixed verbs with an idiomatic meaning can receive a compositional analysis. Non-compositional prefixed verbs are incrementally derived but the meaning of their parts can be updated under certain circumstances.

Linguistica, 2006

The present article aims to shed some light on the combinability of verbs, nouns and adjectives with prepositions - a phenomenon which is common both in Slovene and in English, but has not been extensively commented on by Slovene linguists. In Anglo­ American linguistics, such combinations with prepositions are basically divided into two groups , which tend to be named differently by authors of different linguistic "ori­ entations".

Diego Ardoino and Adriano Cerri (eds). Intersezioni baltistiche. Studi e saggi. (Baltica Pisana Series). , 2021

The aim of this paper is to analyze the nature of the relationship between grammatical aspect, lexical verb semantics and the semantics of prepositions in encoding resultativity in the domain of motion predicates in Polish. UnlikeSpencer and Zaretskaya (1998), I take a bounded PP combining with a prefixed directed motion predicate to be an argument of the verb rather than an adjunct and further, I argue that their analysis of spatial prefixes combining with motion verbs as uniformly encoding static (result) location is too general. Contrary to Svenonius (2004a), I argue that it is not necessary to implicate verbal prefixes in mediating the (secondary) subject-predicate relation via a dedicated functional projection in the syntax. If the semantic relation of (secondary) predication can be encoded without a dedicated functional head in syntax, prefixation can be taken to be morphological (lexical) rather than syntactic, paving up the way for a much simpler syntactic representation of prefixed directed motion predicates than the representation assumed in lexical-syntactic decomposition models.

36th Annual Meeting of the Southern Conference for Slavic Studies, 1998

While attempting to capture systematic relations between form and meaning, transformational grammar has relied upon several tools for analysis. Though the generative enterprise has promised to capture linguistically significant generalizations and in doing so provide an explanatory account of linguistic phenomena, some of these generalizations are impossible to capture in terms of these tools. This is primarily due to a fundamental shortcoming of the mechanisms employed most often in transformational approaches; that is, that many linguistically significant generalizations cannot be expressed by means of a derivational relationship. This paper attempts to lay the groundwork for the analysis of prototypical transitive predicates, in which syntactic and functional equivalency of constructions is captured in terms of direct surface relationships as opposed to derived equivalencies. This is accomplished by means of a 'fuzzy' evaluation metric on the topicality of signs, based upon data from Polish word order in Siewierska's (1993) study.

Proceedings of IATL 24, 2009

SGEM 4th International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conference on Social Sciences and Arts 2017. Sofia,, 2017

The paper provides a construction grammar perspective to identifying meaning of prepositions in Russian. It describes performance of an interpreter uncovering meanings of prepositions in " master " — preposition — " slave " constructions. In contrast to the classical linguistic methodology focusing on the simplest units of different language levels, modern studies practice synthetic methods trying to catch and describe language structures which integrate different language units: words, collocations, etc. Constructions – combinations of lexical, semantic, morphological, syntactical and other features realized in phrases – are of peculiar interest for modern linguists. Complex description and systematization of constructions seek for elaboration of identification methods using manual and automatic techniques as well as analysis of their paradigmatic and syntagmatic features and quantitative analysis of their frequency and strength. The paper features a new method of building the grammar of prepositional constructions for the Russian language (the ontology of Russian prepositions) based on lexical, semantic and morphological contextual markers, as well as one of its possible realisations — the grammar for simple Russian propositions, based on data of the " Syntactical dictionary " by G. Zolotova. The grammar consists of descriptions of lexical and semantic features of meaningful words that build up a context in which some meaning of a preposition is being actualised. The practical and scientific value of this work is connected with the possibility to use its results when computing linguistic tasks in NLP-systems and in further investigation of semantics of prepositions.

Proceedings of ConSOLE XXX, 2022

The paper examines perfective verbs with the delimitative prefix po-(podel) combining with durative adverbials (DurAds) in Slavic, primarily based on examples from Serbian. Since DurAds are standardly assumed to diagnose atelicity, such examples constitute the main argument for separating Slavic perfectivity from telicity (e.g. Borik 2006), and pose the major obstacle for the view that perfectives in Slavic are telic (e.g. Łazorczyk 2010). I propose that DurAds are generated in the QP (a telicity projection), while podel combines with the QP, specifiying a telic predicate for singularity. Consequently, all prefixed perfective verbs in Slavic are necessarily telic.

The focus of this book is how Slavic languages represent spatial relations, and how spatial cognition and perception influence the understanding and linguistic coding of nonspatial domains. Individual analyses concentrate on the semantics of selected prepositions and cases in Bosnian/ Croatian/ Serbian (B/ C/ S), providing a comparative perspective on other Slavic languages, primarily Russian and Polish. The opening analysis discusses the main theoretical notion - metaphorical extension - exemplifying the relation of spatial usages of linguistic items to non-spatial usages. This is followed by an analysis of the most basic spatial relations, "in-ness" and "on-ness." The meaning network of prepositions equivalent to on and in helps explain the meaning of the cases they combine with: the accusative and locative. Another crucial spatial relation, proximity, is taken into account in the semantic analysis of the B/ C/ S prepositions kod and pri, their Slavic equivalents, and cases they combine with: the genitive and locative. The next chapter deals with the spatial meaning of the dative case, examining dative's prepositional usages, the bare directional dative in B/ C/ S, and the semantic relation of the bare directional dative to other meaning domains of this case.

NORDSCI International Conference Proceedings Education and Language edition

The dependency grammars for such languages as Russian usually treat the prepositions in combination with subordinate nouns as major elements as if the case form in the prepositional construction had some self-contained meaning subjected to the regular transformation. This scheme may be valid for languages with restricted declensional paradigms, however, in Russian due to the fact that several case forms are combined with primary prepositions the specific system of joint interpretation of a preposition and a case form is resulted in a system of syntaxemes, minimal syntactical items designed to express semantic notions according to the lexical nature of the governor words in the texts. The syntaxeme structure being the part of the grammatical system has a number of vague manifestations in modern Russian texts which may be acquired from the corpus statistics. The evidences of syntaxeme structure are presented in the ranks of collocations with rough semantic classes of governee nouns with frequent primary prepositions, on the one hand, and the semantico-syntactic role specification of the prepositional construction in the sentence, from the other hand. This structure has several levels of syntactic abstraction. The syntaxeme level is the central layer showing the most frequent combinations of prepositions with noun forms of subordinate semantic classes. Several syntaxemes may be united into the group of so-called semantic rubrics, more or less equal to the semantico-syntactic arguments or roles of the construction in the sentence. The witnesses of semantic rubrics in the texts are usually expressed by secondary prepositions. The bottom level of syntaxeme units is determined by subtle sense variants of the construction produced by the marked semantic classes of governor words of prepositions and governee nouns, which resulted in the merged synonymic and quasi-synonymic usage of prepositional constructions.

Russian Language Journal , 1987

Jezikoslovlje

Orphan prefixes and the grammaticalization of aspect in South Slavic This paper establishes the term ORPHAN PREFIX for a Slavic prefix that no longer shares a dominant spatial meaning with its cognate preposition. Most Slavic pre-fixes do share such a dominant spatial meaning with their cognate prepositions, cf., e.g., the Russian prefix v-and preposition v, both meaning 'into.' Orphan pre-fixes appear to be an important component of many Slavic aspectual systems. However, in most Slavic languages there is at most one prefix that has lost the semantic connection to its cognate preposition and come to function primarily as a grammatical marker of perfectivity. Only three Slavic prefixes are in fact to be considered orphan prefixes, and each only in some Slavic languages. A first case is Bulgarian iz-'out,' as its cognate preposition iz is no longer used in the spatial meaning 'out of.' The most extreme case is Bulgarian po-, which no longer shares the spatial ...

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.