Abstract:This paper explores the history of suffixed semelfactive verbs in Russian, i.e., verbs like maxnut' 'wave once' with the --nu--suffix. It is argued that the semelfactive aktionsart is best analyzed as a radial category organized around a prototype with four properties: uniformity, instantaneousness, non--resultativity, and single occurrence, which are defined and discussed in the article. I go on to demonstrate that there is a small group of verbs denoting bodily acts that meet these criteria in the Old Church Slavonic texts, thus suggesting the existence of an embryonic version of the semelfactive aktionsart in Common Slavic. Although the cue validity of --nu--as a marker of semelfactivity remains stable, in Old Russian --nu--with semelfactive meaning is shown to spread to auditory verbs, optical verbs and verbs of physical movement, which are argued to constitute a radial category organized around prototypical bodily acts. This gradual expansion through the lexicon continues in Contemporary Standard Russian; in particular a number of semelfactive behavior verbs have emerged, although many of them are of low frequency.
This article presents a thorough investigation of the five Russian deictic words that correspond to the English meanings 'here ' and 'now': zdes', tut, sejčas, teper' and vot. We analyze data from the Russian National Corpus and data from Russian TV news broadcasts. On the basis of the corpus data, we propose a radial category network consisting of nine subcategories, which encompass all five words, and show that although the deictic words have overlapping distributions, they all have distinct "radial category profiles" in the sense that they display different centers of gravity in the network. We advance the "Minimal Adaptation Hypothesis", according to which language makes adaptations that are as small as possible, when applied to a new setting, such as the one created by TV.Аннотация: В статье представлено тщательное исследование пяти дейктических слов русского языка, соответсвующих английским местоимениям 'here' и 'now': здесь, тут, сейчас, теперь и вот. Мы проанализировали данные Национального корпуса русского языка, а также данные русских телевизионных выпусков новостей. На основе данных корпуса мы предлагаем радиальную сеть значений, состоящую из девяти подкатегорий и описывающую все пять дейктических слов. Мы показываем, что, хотя исследуемые дейктические единицы пересекаются в их распределении, каждая из них имеет свой «профиль радиальной категории», иными словами, свой центр тяжести в рамках предложенной радиальной сети значений. Мы также выдвигаем «гипотезу минимальной адаптации», согласно которой приспособление языка к новым условиям функционирования, таким как условия телевидения, оказывается по возможности минимальным.
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