scholarly journals Compositional and Verbal Aspect in Greek: The Aorist Imperfect Distinction and the Article-Aspect Interplay

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 181-206
Author(s):  
Desislava Dimitrova ◽  
Krasimir Kabakčiev
Keyword(s):  
Borderline Case ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Verbal Aspect ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
Hybrid Type ◽  
Structural Impact ◽  
Germanic Languages

According to an aspectological model proposed by Kabakčiev in 1984, later developed and sophisticated, languages differ according to whether they mark aspect (perfectivity and imperfectivity) on verbs, as in the Slavic languages – among others, or through nouns/NPs featuring (non-)boundedness which is transferred onto verbs, as in the Germanic languages – among others. In this model of compositional aspect (CA), Bulgarian is a borderline case with a perfective-imperfective and an aorist-imperfect distinction and a definite article only (no indefinite), and the model is used to analyze Greek, a language exhibiting identical features. NP referents play a major role for the compositional explication of aspect. The study finds that Greek is of the same borderline/hybrid type of language as Bulgarian, featuring verbal aspect (VA) predominantly, but also peripherally CA. The aorist/imperfect distinction exists both in Greek and Bulgarian to offset the structural impact of the definite article. Analyzed are some conditions for the explication of CA in Greek and they are found similar to those in Bulgarian. However, there are specificites and differences between the two languages that must be further studied and identified. Keywords: verbal aspect, compositional aspect, definite article, article-aspect interplay, aorist-imperfect contrast

scholarly journals Gender Resolution in Croatian, Slavic and Proto-Indo-European

Fluminensia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-29
Author(s):  
Ranko Matasović
Keyword(s):  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Resolution Rule ◽  
The Common ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Masculine Gender

This paper deals with the origin and development of the gender resolution rule according to which the predicate adjective agrees with the masculine antecedent when there is agreement with a conjunction of subjects at least one of which denotes a male person. Apart from Croatian, such a rule exists (or existed) in the other Slavic languages, as well as in Baltic languages, so it can safely be posited for Proto-Slavic and Proto-Balto-Slavic. We further show that most contemporary and ancient Indo-European languages had such a gender resolution rule. Where such a rule does not exist (as in Germanic languages), there is a plausible historical explanation. In Hittite, which preserves the most ancient gender system of Indo-European (with only common and neuter genders, and no feminine gender), the default agreement is with the common gender noun. Recent advances in our understanding of the development of gender in Indo-European allow us to show that the rule taking the masculine as the default gender has developed from the rule taking the common gender as default. This is because the morphemes showing gender agreement on adjectives and pronouns of the masculine gender have developed from Early Proto-Indo-European morphemes expressing the common gender.

scholarly journals Aspetto verbale e referenza nominale

2016 ◽  
pp. 167-180
Author(s):  
Lucyna Gebert
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Verbal Aspect ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
Restrictive Relative Clauses ◽  
Nominal Arguments ◽  
Indefinite Pronouns

The paper attempts to examine the relation between the verbal aspect in the Slavic languages and the referential status of nominal arguments of the predicate. As is well known, Slavic languages (except Bulgarian and Macedonian) have not developed articles as a grammatical category. It is suggested that in addition to the well-known means of conveying referential information in these articleless languages – such as word order, use of demonstrative/indefinite pronouns, restrictive relative clauses, case alternations and prosody – the verbal aspect also should be taken into account.

scholarly journals Quantitative Estimation of Grammatical Ambiguity: Case of European Languages

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-21
Author(s):  
Eduard S. Klyshinsky ◽  
Varvara K. Logacheva ◽  
Olesya V. Karpik ◽  
Alexander V. Bondarenko
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Estimation ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Ambiguous Words ◽  
Germanic Languages

The grammatical ambiguity (multiple sets of grammatical features for one word form or coinciding surface forms of different words) can be of different types. We distinguish six classes of grammatical ambiguity: unambiguous, ambiguous by grammatical features, by part of speech, by lemma, by lemma and part of speech, and out-of-vocabulary words. These classes are found in all languages, but word distribution may vary significantly. We calculated and analysed the statistics of these six ambiguity classes for a number of European languages. We found that the distribution of ambiguous words among these classes depends primarily on basic linguistic features of a language determining its typology class. Although it is influenced by text style and the considered vocabulary, the distinctive shape of the distribution is preserved under different conditions and differs significantly from distributions for other languages. The fact that the shape is primarily defined by linguistic properties is corroborated by the fact that closely related languages demonstrated in our research similar properties as far as their ambiguous words are concerned. We established that Slavic languages feature a low rate of part-of-speech ambiguous words and a high rate of words which are ambiguous by grammatical features. The former is also true for French and Italian, while the latter holds for German and Swedish, whereas the combination of these traits is characteristic of Slavic languages alone. The experiments showed that reduction of the grammatical feature set does not change the shape of distribution and therefore does not reflect similarity among languages. On the other hand, we found that the top 1000 most frequent words in all the languages considered have different distribution in ambiguity classes unlike in the rest of the words. At the same time, for the majority of considered languages, less frequent words are less unambiguous by part of speech. In Romance and Germanic languages, the ambiguity is reduced for less frequent words. We also investigated the differences in statistics for texts of different genres in the Russian language. We found out that fiction texts are more ambiguous by part of speech than newswire, which are in turn more ambiguous by grammatical features. Our results suggest that the quality of multilingual morphological taggers should be measured relying only on ambiguous words as opposed to all words of the processed text. Such an approach can help get a more objective linguistic picture and enhance the performance of linguistic tools.

scholarly journals Verbal aspect in Serbian children’s language production

Psihologija ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-444
Author(s):  
Maja Savic ◽  
Masa Popovic ◽  
Darinka Andjelkovic
Keyword(s):  
Language Production ◽  
Developmental Stages ◽  
Verbal Aspect ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
Spontaneous Production ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
Mechanisms Of Development ◽  
Firm Evidence

Previous studies have shown that an early usage of verbal aspect in children?s spontaneous production is regularly observed in Slavic languages. However, this leads to the question whether the bare presence of aspect in early utterances is firm evidence that a child has acquired it. In order to show that the acquisition of aspect in Serbian is a process that lasts for several years, elicited production was inspected in children that had already achieved an apparent progress in language (3?5 year-olds). The comparisons with adults were made and several indicators of development were observed: a) the distribution of aspectual forms in children?s and adults? language, b) the ability of functional usage of aspect in narrative, and c) the mastery of contrasting aspectual pairs. The findings provided the ground to propose three developmental stages assumed for the acquisition of Serbian aspect, and possible underlying mechanisms of development are discussed.

scholarly journals Studies on the development of grammar in German, Russian and Bulgarian

2004 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 138
Author(s):  
Natalia Gagarina ◽  
Dagmar Bittner
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Study ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Longitudinal Data ◽  
Experimental Research ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Verbal Aspect ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Definite Articles ◽  
Ma Thesis ◽  
Gender Features

The papers of this 33th volume of the ZAS Papers in Linguistics present intermediate results of the ZAS-project on language acquisition. Currently we deal with the question of which functions children assign to the first grammatical forms they use productively. The goal is to identify grammatical features comprising the child's early grammar. This issue is investigated within the analyses of longitudinal data (cf. the papers of Gagarina/Bittner, Gagarina, Kühnast/Popova/Popov, Bewer) as well as within experimental research (see the papers of Bittner, Kühnast/Popova/Popov). The main topic of this volume is the acquisition of definite articles and verbal aspect. Bewer – who has worked as a student assistant in the project for a long time and wrote her MA-thesis on the topic of the project – investigates children's acquisition of gender features in German. Kühnast/Popova/Popov discuss the correlations between the acquisition of definite articles and verbal aspect in Bulgarian. Bittner presents results of an experimental study on definite article perception in adult German. Gagarina traces the emergence of aspectual oppositions in Russian and examines the validity of the 'aspect before tense' hypothesis for L1-speaking children. Additionally, the paper of Gagarina/Bittner deals with the interrelation between the acquisition of finiteness and verb arguments in Russian and German.  

scholarly journals The role of prefixes in the formation of aspectuality

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Verbal Aspect ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Slavic Linguistics

One of the most widely debated topics in Slavic linguistics has always been verbal aspect, which takes different forms because of the various grammaticalization paths which led to its emergence. In the formation of the category of aspect in Slavic languages, a key role was played by the morphological mechanism of prefixation (a.k.a. preverbation), whereby the prefixes (which originally performed the function of markers of adverbial meanings) came to act as markers of boundedness. This volume contains thirteen articles on the mechanism of prefixation, written by leading international scholars in the field of verbal aspect. Ancient and modern Slavic varieties, as well as non-Slavic and even non-Indo-European languages, are represented, making the volume an original and significant contribution to Slavic as well as typological linguistics.

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