Article
Семантика и морфосинтаксис одной мокшанской аспектуальной деривации
The paper deals with semantic and morphosyntax of one aspectual derivation in Moksha
Nearly two thousand perfective verbs in Russian are formed via the addition of so-called "empty prefixes" (čistovidovye pristavki) to imperfective base verbs. The traditional assumption that prefixes are semantically "empty" when used to form aspectual pairs is problematic because the same prefixes are clearly "non-empty" when combined with other base verbs. Though some scholars have suspected that the prefixes are not empty but instead have meanings that overlap with the meanings of the base verbs, proof of this hypothesis has eluded researchers. With the advent of corpora and electronic resources it is possible to explore this question on the basis of large quantities of data. This article presents a new methodology, called "radial category profiling", in which the semantic network of a prefix is established on the basis of its "non-empty" uses and then compared, node by node, with the semantic network of base verbs that use the same prefix as an "empty" perfectivizing morpheme. This methodology facilitates a comprehensive analysis of ten prefixes, comparing their meanings in "non-empty" and "empty" uses and showing precisely how in the latter case overlap produces the illusion of emptiness. We are able to fully specify the semantic network of each prefix, and discover that for some prefixes there is overlap throughout the network, while for others overlap is restricted to a contiguous subsection of the network. We investigate the dynamic interactions among prefixes, and identify what meanings are incompatible with the "purely aspectual" function of the so-called "empty" prefixes. The results of our analyses, including complete lists of verbs, are publicly available at: http://emptyprefixes.uit.no/ and http://emptyprefixes. uit.no/methodology-eng.htm.
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 explained in terms of prototypical and non-prototypical matches of time reference and aspectual semantics: perfectives primarily refer to completed, past events while imperfectives prototypically describe ongoing, non-past events.
The Caucasus is the place with the greatest linguistic variation in Europe. The present volume explores this variation within the tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality systems in the languages of the North-East Caucasian (or Nakh-Daghestanian) family. The papers of the volume cover the most challenging and typologically interesting features such as aspect and the complicated interaction of aspectual oppositions expressed by stem allomorphy and inflectional paradigms, grammaticalized evidentiality and mirativity, and the semantics of rare verbal categories such as the deliberative (‘May I go?’), the noncurative (‘Let him go, I don’t care’), different types of habituals (gnomic, qualitative, non-generic), and perfective tenses (aorist, perfect, resultative). The book offers an overview of these features in order to gain a broader picture of the verbal semantics covering the whole North-East Caucasian family. At the same time it provides in-depth studies of the most fascinating phenomena.
This volume is a contribution to the typology of the category of aspect. Its aim is bringing forward new empirical data from languages not yet (widely) covered in typological aspectual investigations and to start or broaden their typological discussion. The articles in the paper are grouped in two sections. The first section is an account of aspectual systems of languages in four linguistic areas, including Europe, the Caucasus, Northeast Eurasia, and Africa and the Americas. The second section focusses on specific aspectual categories in individual languages or cross-linguistically.
The volume is dedicated to Viktor Khrakovsky's 80th anniversary. Viktor Khrakovsky is among the most prominent Russian typologists. He was among the creators of Peterburg typological school. The volume includes papers in typology, Russian lingusitics, Arabic studies and other domains of linguistics.
The contribution discusses the morphosyntactic behavior of a number of Gǝʿǝz verbs denoting states and focuses on the interplay between their lexical meaning and the inflectional morphemes qatala, yəqattəl, and qatilo.
This work shows that being must originally be understood as implication. We begin with what Heidegger calls Hegel’s ‘new concept of being’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit: time as history is the essence of being. This concept however, is not univocal—for supersession means destroying-preserving. Hegel shows himself to be the thinker of truth as essentially ambiguous; and the Phenomenology is onto-heno-chrono-phenomenology, the history of the being and unity, time and aspect, of the concept’s ambiguity. For Heidegger however, conceptual ambiguity confirms that Hegel’s history of being is stuck in a vulgar interpretation of time; and the Phenomenology can explain neither the origin of this time, nor the necessity of negation for the historical determination of being—for Hegel cannot think the ground of the concept of being, that is, the grounding of the ground. If Heidegger argues however, that the Phenomenology is predetermined by its ancient point of departure, we must go back to the Greeks, back to Aristotle’s original insight (overlooked by the entire history of philosophy as metaphysics): being and unity imply one another—for they are essentially implications. Thus the question of the meaning of being becomes the question of the meaning of implication.
Some properties of Russian modal constructions with reflexive verbs marked by -sja are discussed in the paper – in particular, modal passives (U menja diplom ne pišetsja – lit. ‘With me, graduataion paper is not being written’, i.e. ‘I do not make any progress with my graduation paperʼ) and modal impersonal passives. Firstly, the marking of the base subject is claimed to be only indirectly related to the transitivity of the base verb: Summaries and Keywords 782 in modern Russian, all theoretically possible combinations (u-phrase + transitive base verb, dative subject + intransitive base verb, as well as more rare u-phrase + intransitive base verb and dative subject + transitive base verb) can be observed. Secondly, in some contexts, such as questions like Chego tebe ne P ‘Why do not you P’ some restrictions on the use of impersonal modal constructions become less stringent.