This issue contains articles by the keynote speakers at the international conference The Russian Verb. Formal and Contrastive Approaches to Aspect, Tense, and Mood in Russian, which took place at the Norwegian University Center in St. Petersburg on May 27–30, 2010.
The following articles could not be included in the present issue, but will appear in printed form in issue 58:1, to be appear in April 2012. The online versions are available through Taylor and Francis’ iFirst service (see “Forthcoming articles” at http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ssla20/current).
Genitive-nominative and genitive-accusative alternations exist to various degrees in Slavic and Baltic languages. In Russian the alternation of Gen-Nom and Gen-Acc in negative sentences is conditioned by a combination of syntactic, semantic, and morphological factors. A series of papers by Borschev and Partee and by the present set of authors has studied the semantic factors involved in the genitive of negation. Our recent work builds on the intuition that genitive NPs are “less referential” than their nominative or accusative counterparts; both we and Olga Kagan take that decreased referentiality to involve a “demotion”. We have formalized this demotion in terms of semantic types, arguing that Gen NPs in these alternations are of property type <e,t> rather than entity type e. In this article we address how verb meanings shift along with the types of their arguments. We review the treatment of Borschev and Partee (1998) of the “bleaching” of the open class of intransitive verbs that appear in existential sentences with Subject Gen Neg, and compare it to the more heterogeneous class of shifts in verb meaning that occurs with Object Gen Neg. The resulting analysis helps to explain both the similarities and the differences between Subject Gen Neg and Object Gen Neg.
This article proposes a semantic approach to Slavic verbal prefixes. A hypothesis is put forward according to which a verbal prefix imposes a relation between two degrees on a scale. One is a degree associated with the event denoted by the verbal predicate. The other one is the standard of comparison, contributed by a linguistic expression that appears in the sentence, or by the context. The scale to which the prefix applies is most typically contributed by the linguistic environment in which the prefix appears. The article demonstrates how the proposed analysis applies to two specific morphemes in Russian: the prefix nedo- and the prefix pere- under the interpretation of excess. It is demonstrated that these prefixes apply to a wide range of scales, including property and volume/extent scales, a time scale, as well as certain scales that do not affect the aspectual properties of the predicate but are lexicalized by the verbal stem. It is also argued that the two prefixes apply to the same type of standard of comparison, which has been shown in the literature to play a role in the adjectival domain.
General (or existential) yes-no questions are considered to be the typical context for the so-called general-factual (obščefaktičeskoe) meaning of the imperfective aspect. If the imperfective aspect is used in its general-factual meaning in general yes-no questions such as Vasja ran´še perevodil ėtot tekst? ‘Has Vasja translated this text before?’, the question seeks to clarify whether there has been at least one such situation in which the given text was translated by Vasja. In this case the description of the situation has the status of non-referential indefiniteness: Has there been at least one such situation as X? It will be shown that general yes-no questions in the imperfective aspect completely analogous to general yes-no questions in the perfective aspect can also be related to an individualized situation, that is, to a situation that the speaker assumes to be known to the addressee. Vasja perevel/perevodil tekst, kotoryj emu dali? On zametil, čto ne chvataet dvuch stranic? ‘Did Vasja translate the text given to him? Did he notice that two pages are missing?’ In this case the description of the situation in both aspects, in the perfective aspect as well in the imperfective aspect, has the status of referential definiteness: Did the situation X take place? The aim of the article is to describe the conditions that determine whether a general yes-no question in the imperfective aspect is related to a general or to an individualized situation.
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.
It is generally assumed that verbs in Russian are specified as perfective or imperfective in the lexicon. This paper develops an alternative: verbs are lexically aspectless, and aspectual operators only enter the derivation when the functional structure of a clause is created. The crucial evidence for this view comes from two facts about argument-supporting nominalizations. First, unlike fully inflected clauses, nominalizations based on “perfective” verb stems do not exhibit perfectivity effects, and hence aspect is not part of their structure. Secondly, fully inflected clauses and nominals share a constituent containing VP and a restricted number of functional projections dominating it. It follows from these two generalizations that aspectual operators must be located outside the constituent clauses and nominals have in common. This conclusion makes it possible to reduce crucially cross-linguistic variation in the domain of aspect and to eliminate theoretically undesirable assumptions that aspect in languages like Russian and languages like English is construed in different ways.
2. The syntax of Russian temporal adjunct clauses (do/posle togo kak…) shows overt parts that had to be stipulated for English as covert in earlier papers. We are thus able to present a neat and straightforward analysis of Russian temporal adjuncts.
Suffix shift is a phenomenon in which some Russian verbs replace the unproductive suffix /a/ with the productive /aj/, thus supplanting forms like bryzžut ‘(they) spatter’ with bryzgajut. This article reports on a large-scale corpus-based study of the development of suffix shift over time. We investigate the phenomenon on three levels. First, the overall picture emerging from our study is one of stability over time: in general, suffix shift has shown very limited growth from the eighteenth century to the present day. Second, we explore a number of factors pertaining to the shape of the verbal stem. Although these factors display statistical significance, our analysis shows that the factors have limited impact. Our investigation of the shape of the stem therefore lends further support to the diachronic stability of suffix shift. At the same time, the differences among the factors under scrutiny show that suffix shift is a complex diachronic phenomenon. The third level we discuss is that of individual lexemes. Our study testifies to the complexity of suffix shift, insofar as individual verbs display very different behaviors.
The article aims at presenting Slavic aspectual oppositions from a typological point of view (following earlier suggestions of Dahl, Dickey and others), so that the rate of idiosyncratic to common features in Slavic aspectual systems can be assessed against a universal background. Section 1 is an introduction, section 2 briefly characterizes the universal notion of aspect as it appears cross-linguistically, while section 3 discusses typologically relevant properties of Slavic aspectual categories and their linguistic expression. The main claim is that Slavic aspectual systems are much less typical than often thought. The following features are given special attention: a binary aspectual opposition built upon semantically broad “aspectual clusters”; a perfective aspect expressing momentariness rather than temporal boundedness, and a system of perfectivizing derivational prefixes with additional classificatory functions.
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 over- all 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 indetermi- nate 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.
This article aims to discuss and rationalize two arguments. Argument 1: The relationships between verbal word components (and thus between each verbal word form) constitute a hierarchy. Argument 2: Verbal word components (and thus each verbal word form) interact with each other. On the basis of the theoretical conclusions reached the article also proposes an analysis of the categories aspect, tense, and mood of the Russian verb.