Temporal ‘Since’ in Slovak: Conjunction(s) and Aspect Choice – A Corpus Study

Abstract

It has recently been shown by especially [1] through [4] and [12] for Russian and by [8] and [9] for Polish that conjunctions corresponding to Dutch sinds (cf. also [1], [2], [3]) and English since (cf. also [7], [10]) have temporal functions, which are subject to restrictions on the choice of tense and aspect. Ultimately these restrictions can be related to the semantic input of tense and aspect into complex sentences with these connective items. For Polish extensive data provided by corpus research enabled us to shed light on the usage and restrictions in this area and also to establish which constellations with particular conjunctions are more or less likely or not possible (cf. [8], [9]). In the present contribution we present freshly sourced quantitative Slovak SNK-corpus data. We consider the sixteen logically possible tense-aspect constellations, and the Slovak connective items: odkedy; odvtedy, čo / ako; od chvíle, keď / čo / ako; od tých čias, čo / ako; od tej doby, čo / ako. This quantitative data study is intended to pinpoint the areas of future research; for this purpose at certain instances comparisons are made with Polish, the only other language we have such data for to date.