Grammatical aspect in the Slavic languages

All Slavic languages distinguish between at least two kinds of grammatical aspect: the imperfective aspect and the perfective aspect.

Context

Slavic languages

The Slavic languages, sometimes known as the Slavonic languages, are a subfamily of the larger Indo-European language family.^[1]^[2] Collectively, they are most closely related to the Baltic languages, best known among them being Lithuanian and Latvian.^[2] The Slavic languages descend from a common ancestral language known as Proto-Slavic.^[3] This ancestor experienced internal linguistic divisions during the early centuries anno Domini and is generally considered to have diverged around 800 AD when the dialects were no longer fully mutually intelligible with one another, though the languages still retain a level of mutual intelligibility even today.^[4] Within the larger Slavic language family, there are three major subdivisions: East Slavic, West Slavic, and South Slavic.^[5]

East Slavic makes up the vast majority of speakers and includes Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian.^[6] The West Slavic branch is composed of languages such as Polish, Czech, and Slovak. South Slavic, the smallest group, comprises Serbo-Croatian – including its localized national varieties of Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin – as well as Bulgarian, Macedonian, Slovene, and the historical Old Church Slavonic, which remains in use as a liturgical language in some varieties of Eastern Christian worship, mostly through the various Eastern Orthodox churches.^[1]^[7]

Grammatical aspect

Grammatical aspect expresses the internal, temporal structure of a verb.^[8] It contrasts with grammatical tense which only expresses the time in which an event took place relative to a deictic center, typically centered around the speech act.^[9] All Slavic languages distinguish between grammatical aspects.^[10] The term first appeared in English around 1853 to describe the function in the Slavic languages as distinct from other Western studies of grammar.^[11] The term itself is a calque, or loan translation, from the Russian word вид (vid; 'grammatical aspect', also 'sight, view').^[11]^[12]

General characteristics

All Slavic languages distinguish between a core dichotomy of imperfective and perfective aspects.^[13]^[14] This dichotomy is present in almost all verbs and their nominalizations.^[15] The perfective is used to describe actions or states which are considered "complete, completed, total, or unified, or with a reference to a specific location in space and time, or to the completion of a specific goal".^[16] By contrast, imperfective forms describe those "which are incomplete, still in progress, repeated or habitual".^[16]

The formation of perfective–imperfective pairs is based on two processes. Perfectives are typically based on the addition of a perfectivizing prefix, a prefix added to a root imperfective simplex verb – that is, an unaffixed root verb which expresses an imperfective function – in order to form its perfective counterpart.^[17] In general, simplex verbs tend to be imperfective and atelic.^[18] Examples of this include the imperfective Russian verb писать (pisat', 'to write') and its perfective counterpart написать (napisat', 'to write').^[17] If a perfective verb already contains a prefix which changes its meaning outside of its aspect, a suffix may be used instead to imperfectivize it. For example, the Russian verb составить (sostavit', 'to constitute, to compose') is imperfectivized as составлять (sostavljat', 'to constitute, to compose').^[19] The latter form is much more common, accounting for the formation of about sixty-four percent of all perfective–imperfective pairs.^[17] Alternations may also occur as a result of a change in aspect in lieu of a prefix; these alternations may include changes in vowel quality (including deletion), vowel length, and stress.^[20]

Certain kinds of adverbs and semantic domains tend to prefer one form or another. For example, adverbs meaning "at once" or punctual verbs such as "to kill" are associated with the perfective.^[21] In general, the perfective form is considered the marked form; the imperfective is typically used if an action is not explicitly designated as "completed".^[22]

In West and East Slavic, the use of present-tense inflections on perfective verbs is used to indicate a future tense. In the South Slavic language Serbo-Croatian, for example, the term dođem ('I [often] come') contrasts with its East Slavic Russian counterpart дойду (dojdu, 'I will reach').^[23]

Imperatives

imperatives are found using both perfective and imperfective forms, though the use of one or the other semantically is somewhat controversial. In general, non-negative imperfective usage may indicate politeness, though it may also indicate vulgarity and urgency as well.^[24] Perfective usage may show completion, as in other verbal constructions, but may be rudely abrupt or more neutrally polite. In Russian, for example, the perfective form сядь (sjad', 'sit down!') contrasts with the imperfective садись (sadis', 'be seated!').^[24] The Russian perfective form implies a kind of social distance, giving a neutral tone in terms of politeness in formal contexts; the imperfective, by being less distant, can be perceived as extremely polite or exceptionally rude depending on context.^[24] In Czech, the use of perfective imperatives tend to express a lack of agency by the subject over the outcome, such as getting a cold.^[24]

In negative imperatives, there is a tendency towards imperfective forms, though the use of imperative perfective verbs can be used as a warning; compare the Czech imperfective neplač ('don't cry') with the Russian perfective не упадите (ne upadite, 'don't fall, be careful not to fall').^[25] Negative imperative sentences show similar distribution in aspectual usage as negative declarative sentences.^[24] Among the South Slavic languages, only Slovene uses perfectives regularly in these contexts.^[24]

Biaspectuality

While some Slavic verbs do not have a perfective form at all, others are biaspectual, meaning that they perform both imperfective and perfective semantic functions.^[26] Although a few biaspectual forms are of Slavic origin, loanwords comprise the majority of the biaspectual corpus.^[27] are commonly considered biaspectual, though this varies substantially in different Slavic languages.^[28] Polish, for example, is extremely quick to integrate loanword; recent loans generally considered to be biaspectual have been reported with strictly perfectivizing prefixes, as in interpretować ('to interpret', biaspectual) and zinterpretować ('to interpret', perfective). Russian and Czech appear to be less likely to integrate native perfectivizing processes on loans.^[29]

Although they are homographs, biaspectual verbs do not appear to be homophonous.^[29] In listener acceptability tests conducted on Czech and Russian speakers, sentences which used a biaspectual verb twice – once in a perfective context and the other in an imperfective context – were rejected as ungrammatical.^[29]

The centrality of aspect to the Slavic grammatical system make distinguishing between perfective and imperfective forms an important part of avoiding ambiguity. There are two main strategies of disambiguation: the insertion of a new imperfectivizing suffix – as in non-standard Russian организовывать (organizovyvat', 'to organize'), an imperfectivized derivative of организовать (organizovat', 'to organize') – or the application of a perfectivizing prefix.^[27] The application of perfectivizing prefixes has also led to alternative or specialized forms. For example, the Ukrainian verb арештувати (areštuvaty, 'to arrest') was perfectivized to зааресштувати (zaareštuvaty) with the prefix за- (za-), but the perfectivized form has been re-imperfectivized as заарештовувати (zaareštovuvati) with the suffix -ов (-ov).^[27]

Development

The aspectual system of the Slavic languages developed throughout the Proto-Slavic period, during which aspect began to overtake tense as the more important semantic indicator in the Slavic languages.^[30] Although the Proto-Indo-European language, an ancestor of Proto-Slavic, already distinguished between perfective and imperfective aspects in the past tense, Proto-Slavic is considered to have emphasized the role of aspect relative to its Proto-Indo-European ancestor.^[31] The differentiation of perfective and imperfective aspects are robustly attested in the earliest Old Church Slavonic texts.^[32]

Proto-Slavic had a series of prefixes which later developed into perfective markers before it diverged into the distinct Slavic languages.^[33] This development is unique among Indo-European languages; while other language subfamilies such as Greek or Germanic use verbal prefixes to mark semantic changes, Slavic is the only subfamily that uses prefixes to mark aspect.^[33]^[34]

Perfectivizing prefixes – that is, prefixes added to an imperfective root verb to create a perfective complement – and imperfectivizing suffixes remained productive in late Proto-Slavic and into some early attested forms such as Old Church Slavonic, though these imperfectivizing suffixes are considered to be the origin of the aspectual system of the Slavic languages.^[35] In general, simplex root verbs were imperfect, but the application of a prefix typically changed the lexical meaning of the verb entirely.^[35] Classifying prefixes were originally attached to the root verb, giving the verb a new meaning, either by expressing their relation in space – as in the comparison between modern Russian идти (idti, 'to go') with выйти (vyjti; 'to exit', but lit. 'to go out') – or in their metaphorical use, as in стоять (stojat', 'to stand') against выстоять (vystojat'; 'to survive', but lit. 'stand out'). These verbs were thus understood as perfective verbs and had to have an imperfectivizing process in order to support that semantic function.^[36]

The proliferation of the aspectual function to the prefix over its locative function resulted from the semantic bleaching of about seventeen prefixes – most notably *jьz- ('from, out of'), *po- ('after, by, at'), *sъn- ('from, with'), and *u- ('away') – whereby these prefixes became less salient in expressing a spacial meaning.^[37] The prefix *u- in particular, originally expressing proximity or result, underwent bleaching due to its overuse in verbs of motion with a clear deixis and was thus reanalyzed.^[38] The overlap in meaning with the other aforementioned prefixes and several others led to their own bleaching. As a result, a prefixing aspectual system began to take root. This process was concurrent with the development of the imperfectivizing suffixing system.^[39]

The exact source of the emergence of the Slavic languages' complex aspectual usage is contested. One explanation is that the imperfectivizing suffixes were the result of a typologically rare combination of a stativizing suffix with the increasing use of prefixes to perform aspectual functions.^[32] Another explanation argues that the use of prefixes to change the semantics of the verb led to the use of imperfectivizing suffixes to distinguish, following the development of semantic bleaching in those prefixes towards a perfectivizing function.^[32] The role of simplex verbs in early Slavic languages has also attracted debate.^[40] It is possible that they occupied an anaspectual position – that is, signifying no particular aspectual information whatsoever – though it is likely that these verbs were used as imperfectives, given that most later developed into imperfectives in the modern languages.^[40]

East–West theory

The development of the Slavic aspectual system did not arise clearly along phylogenetic lines, though an isogloss has been mapped by Slavic linguists to describe two overarching aspectual typologies: the Eastern group, comprising the East Slavic languages and Bulgarian, and the Western group, comprising Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, and Slovene.^[41] This division appears to have developed as the result of several accumulated changes beginning around the 17th century in the Eastern group, namely regarding the narrowing of perfective usage around habitual events.^[42]

Polish and Serbo-Croatian are both considered to be transitional languages and share characteristics of both, though Polish leans eastward whereas Serbo-Croatian leans westward.^[43]^[42] Serbo-Croatian itself has an internal coninuum; Croatian is more typologically Western, while Serbian is more typologically Eastern.^[44] Macedonian's position is somewhat unclear, though it is either a divergent form of the Eastern group or a transitional dialect which leans most towards the Eastern group.^[45]^[42] Although Serbian is more typologically Eastern than other varieties of Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian is more Eastern than Serbian.^[44] Bulgarian aspectual use does depart from East Slavic usage in some substantial ways – including its use of the perfective aspect with the imperfect tense to express habitual actions – though even these deviations follow other rules of the typological class and are not considered substantial enough to warrant a unique categorization.^[44] Because of the differences exhibited by Bulgarian and Macedonian, the East Slavic languages are sometimes referred to as the "Eastern extreme" to distinguish them; Czech, Slovak, and Sorbian have been similarly dubbed the "Western extreme" due to some deviations from Slovene.^[44]

Among languages found in the Eastern group, the perfective is defined by "temporal definiteness" where the Western group is marked by "totality". The imperfective is marked as having "qualitative temporal indefiniteness" in the Eastern group where the Western group centers around a "quantitative" alternative.^[46] In the Eastern group, the perfective is defined by its role in explicitly linking discrete events in a sequence. By contrast, the imperfective is qualitative in that it cannot be assigned to a singular event which can be related to other discrete events.^[47] Among languages in the Western group, the perfective is used to united an event as a "single indivisible whole" as is done in the Eastern group, but it does not link its argument to other events surrounding it.^[48] The imperfective among the Western group, conversely, can be assigned to several different – but indefinite – events.^[49]

References

Citations

^ ^a ^b Trask 2000, p. 313.
^ ^a ^b Sussex & Cubberley 2006, p. 17.
^ Sussex & Cubberley 2006, p. 25.
^
- For modern mutual intelligibility, see Sussex & Cubberley 2006, p. 3.
- For everything else, see Langston 2018, p. 1398.
^ Langston 2018, p. 1398.
^ Sussex & Cubberley 2006, pp. 5–7.
^ Sussex & Cubberley 2006, pp. 64–65.
^
- Ringe 2018, p. 95.
- Mithun 2019, § Summary.
- Kamphuis 2020, p. 30.
^ Mithun 2019, § Summmary, § 2. Aspect.
^
- Kamphuis 2014, p. 127.
- Dickey 2024, p. 211.
- Wiemer & Seržant 2017, p. 241.
^ ^a ^b Binnick 1991, pp. 135–136.
^ Fortuin & Kamphuis 2015, p. 164.
^ Wiemer & Seržant 2017, p. 245.
^ Kamphuis 2020, pp. ix, 31.
^ Migdalski 2018, p. 1561.
^ ^a ^b Sussex & Cubberley 2006, p. 244.
^ ^a ^b ^c Dickey 2024, p. 212.
^ Sussex & Cubberley 2006, p. 442.
^ Kamphuis 2020, p. 31.
^ Sussex & Cubberley 2006, pp. 199–200, 211.
^ Sussex & Cubberley 2006, p. 344.
^ Sussex & Cubberley 2006, p. 343.
^ Sussex & Cubberley 2006, p. 243.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Sussex & Cubberley 2006, p. 363.
^ Sussex & Cubberley 2006, pp. 344–345.
^ Sussex & Cubberley 2006, p. 345.
^ ^a ^b ^c Sussex & Cubberley 2006, p. 443.
^ Dickey 2024, pp. 214–215.
^ ^a ^b ^c Dickey 2024, p. 215.
^
- For the origin of the aspectual system, see Kamphuis 2020, p. ix.
- For its overtaking tense, Sussex & Cubberley 2006, p. 41.
^ Sussex & Cubberley 2006, p. 41.
^ ^a ^b ^c Dickey 2024, p. 226.
^ ^a ^b Dickey 2018, p. 85.
^ Wiemer & Seržant 2017, p. 240.
^ ^a ^b Dickey 2018, p. 88.
^ Dickey 2024, pp. 212–213.
^
- For the definitions of the prefixes, see Derksen 2008, pp. 217, 407, 478, and 506, respectively.
- For everything else, see Dickey 2018, p. 99.
^
- For the use of *u- as a resultative prefix, see Dickey 2024, p. 226.
- For everything else, see Dickey 2018, p. 99.
^ Dickey 2018, p. 99.
^ ^a ^b Dickey 2024, p. 227.
^
- Kamphuis 2014, p. 127.
- Fortuin & Kamphuis 2015, p. 168.
- Dickey 2015, pp. 29–30.
^ ^a ^b ^c Dickey 2015, p. 30.
^ Kamphuis 2014, pp. 127–128.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Dickey 2015, p. 32.
^ Kamphuis 2014, p. 150.
^ Fortuin & Kamphuis 2015, p. 168.
^ Fortuin & Kamphuis 2015, pp. 169–170.
^ Fortuin & Kamphuis 2015, pp. 170–171.
^ Fortuin & Kamphuis 2015, p. 171.

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