The typology of Slavic aspect: a review of the East-West Theory of Slavic aspect

Abstract

Until recently, differences between the verbal aspectual systems of the individual Slavic languages have not received much attention and data was often interpreted to hold for all Slavic languages. Only in the past decades has this situation changed and to date a number of studies comparing two or more Slavic languages have seen the light of day. Independently from each other, Barentsen and Dickey have devised theories which account for the observed differences between respective Slavic languages. Their approaches are so similar that we think it is justified to speak of a single, comprehensive theory which attributes the differences in the functioning of the systems to differences in the meaning of the perfective and imperfective aspect for the individual languages. This leads to a typology in which there is an Eastern and a Western type of Slavic verbal aspectual system, hence the name 'EastWest Theory'. In this paper, we provide a critical analysis of this theory, focusing on three context types: habitual contexts, narrative contexts and retrospective contexts. Our analysis shows that the theory adequately and convincingly explains most of the data. However, we will also demonstrate that there are still areas in which the theory needs to be developed further, and we provide some suggestions as to how this can be approached.Аннотация Различия в употреблении глагольного вида в разных славянских язы-ках долгое время не привлекали особого внимания. Однако в последние десятилетия появилось несколько работ, направленных именно на выявление различий между дан-ными видовыми системами. Среди них наиболее последовательным и детальным под-ходом можно считать теорию противопоставления восток-запад в славянском видеWe would like to thank Adriaan Barentsen, Stephen Dickey and Hana Filip for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper. We are also grateful to the members of the 'Amsterdam Slavic Aspect Circle' of the University of Amsterdam (besides Adriaan Barentsen, Magda van Duijkeren-Hrabová, René Genis, Janneke Kalsbeek, Radovan Lučić), with whom we have discussed this paper on various occasions. We are especially grateful to Iztok Mikulan and Magda van Duijkeren-Hrabová for their willingness to discuss the Slovene and Czech examples respectively with us. Any remaining mistakes are our own. ('теория восток-запад'). Эту теорию развивали (независимо друг от друга) голланд-ский славист Барентсен и американский славист Дики. Данная теория объясняет системные различия в употреблении глагольного вида в славянских языках, предла-гая разные определения общего значения видов в тех или иных группах этих языков. Противопоставляются восточный и западный типы славянского вида. В настоящем исследовании проводится критический анализ этой теории. При этом в основном рас-сматриваются три типа аспектуального контекста, играющих наиболее важную роль в теории: многократность, повествовательность и ретроспективность. Наш анализ по-казывает, что теория адекватно и убедительно объясняет имеющийся фактический материал. Однако некоторые...

Borrowed preverbs and the limits of contact-induced change in aspectual systems

“…However, even if highly grammaticalized, aspectual categories show considerable and principled variation across Slavic languages, as has been shown by a number of recent studies such as e.g. Stunová (1993), Petruchina (2000, Dickey (2000Dickey ( , 2005Dickey ( , 2008Dickey ( , 2015, Wiemer (2008), Vimer (2015, Fortuin, Kamphuis (2015), among many others. This variation reveals itself in such parameters as differences in the productivity of (secondary) imperfectivization (generally increasing from West to East, cf.…”

Aspect as a communicative category. Evidence from English, Russian and French

“…He (2011) also believes that all Russian verbs are born aspectless. This assumption is a precondition, if one wants to treat aspect in the same way in all languages (For an account of how Russian aspect is treated in the East and the West, see Fortuin & Kamphuis 2015).…”

Unanswered questions of Slavic aspect: a reply to ‘Thoughts on the ‘Typology of Slavic aspect’ ’

“…In his response Dickey discusses some of the issues raised by us, framing them as 'problematic empirical claims'. In the present reaction, we will try to keep the number of examples limited and refer to our prior article (Fortuin and Kamphuis 2015) for a more detailed discussion, but for the sake of clarity will repeat some examples from the prior article, and add some new material as well. The order in which we will discuss the various contexts, is the order in which they were presented in our previous article, which is also the order in which Dickey discusses them in his response.…”