Grenzüberschreitungen an der Peripherie: Aspektuelle Funktionen von Aktivpartizipien und Verbalsubstantiven im Tschechischen

Abstract

Summary Non-finite verb forms are located at the boundary of the verbal paradigm. On the one hand, they are formed paradigmatically and – if they are not lexicalized – correspond semantically to the underlying verb; on the other hand, they behave syntactically like nominal forms. Their interpretation and thus their treatment in grammars and in corpus annotation differ in individual national philological traditions. In the present text, the behavior of Czech participles and verbal nouns is investigated with respect to the category of verbal aspect. On the basis of excerpts from electronic corpora (Czech National Corpus), it is shown that both participles and verbal nouns express aspectual functions. Even more, they are capable of overstepping boundaries of codification and formal description and actualizing these aspectual functions in concrete contexts. However, participles and verbal nouns do not behave in the same way, but follow certain lines, which are given by differences in codification, formal morphology and syntactic functions.