Slot: 28D-7 Dec. 28, 3:45 p.m. – 5:45 p.m.
Panel: The Verb: Morphology and Morphosyntax
Chair: Elisabeth Elliott, Northwestern
University
Title: Ukrainian Imperfective Future in the
Theory of Grammaticalization
Author: Roksolana Mykhaylyk, Stony Brook
University
The development of an inflectional form
from a periphrastic construction has been the object of a great number of
historical linguistics studies. A classical example of such phenomenon is the
Romance inflectional future formed from the Latin construction Infinitive + habere ‘have’ (Roberts 1993). Interestingly, a
similar formation was identified in Ukrainian (the only Slavic language that
employs synthetic imperfective future).
The purpose of
this paper is to analyze a diachronic change in result of which Old Slavic
independent items – an infinitive and the present of imati ‘have’ (Lunt 2001) - were merged and
Ukrainian simple future was formed:
1)
imutъ
prositi > prositi imutъ > prositi imut
>prosytymut′.
Recently
advanced theory of grammaticalization (Heine 2002) provides us with a clear
model that captures principal stages in the change from the lexical word ‘have’
to an auxiliary, and then to a morpheme.
The paper
examines four properties of grammaticalization: semantic ‘bleaching’,
phonological weakening, loss of pragmatic significance, and loss of syntactic
freedom. The evidence suggesting the above defined development is found in Old
Slavic and in Modern Ukrainian, particularly in its Western dialects where
reflexes of imeti (-mu,
-meš, -me, -memo, -mete, -mut)
still occur as verbal clitics:
There are thus
several implications of the Ukrainian future tense investigation. Specifically,
it contributes to the extension of the theory of grammaticalization to account
for the change ‘clitic-to-affix’ and for the variations in grammatical
structure of languages exhibiting this phenomenon.
References
Heine,
B & Kuteva, T. 2002. Word Lexicon of Grammaticalization.
Cambridge: University Press.
Lunt, Horace G. 2001. Old Church
Slavonic Grammar.
Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Roberts, Ian. 1993. "A Formal Account
of Grammaticalization in the History of Romance Futures." Folia
Linguistica Historica 13.1-2: 219-258.
Title: Verb Tenses in Spoken Russian (With
Respect to Speech Verbs)
Author: Nadezhda Frid, Computational Linguistics
Laboratory, Institute for Information Transmission Problems, Moscow
The aim of the research is to suggest an
explanation for a narrative tense switch from the past to the present in modern
spoken Russian. The research data come from the collection of ‘Night Dream
Stories’ (described, inter alia, in Kibrik & Podlesskaya 2003) and the
corpus available in Russkaja razgovornaja rech' 1978.
In
Russian, events can be narrated in the past or in the historical present.
Having chosen a narrative strategy, one can digress from it in certain
contexts. For example, having chosen the past as the main strategy, the speaker
often uses the present for verbs introducing direct speech (zasnula, i noch′yu ko mne prishel myshonok i govorit… ‘[I] fell.PAST asleep and at night a
little mouse came.PAST to me and says.PRESENT…’).
The
switch from the past to the present is statistically less common for verbs
introducing indirect speech (skazat′,
chto ‘to tell that’) and
is not typical for speech verbs without sentential complements (izvinit′sya ‘to apologize’).
The
regularity can be accounted for in the following way. Direct speech reproduces
the speech act from the viewpoint of its speaker and focuses on the unfolding
of events. Indirect speech does not reproduce but reports the speech act in
order to get the gist. Speech verbs without sentential complements only refer
to a speech act. Since the historical present reflects events as if unfolding
before the speaker’s and hearer’s eyes, the tense switch from the past to the
present is typical for verbs introducing direct speech, less typical for verbs
introducing indirect speech and not typical for speech verbs without sentential
complements.
References
Kibrik A.A., Podlesskaya
V.I. 2003. K sozdaniju korpusov ustnoj russkoj rechi: principy
transkribirovanija / Nauchno-texnicheskaja informacija-2, 10, pp. 5-12.
Russkaja
razgovornaja rech′.
Teksty. Otv. red. Zemskaja E.A., Kapanadze L.A. M.,1978.
Title: The Communicative Status of Previously
Undescribed Morphosyntactic Peculiarities of Upper Sorbian
Author: Gary H. Toops, Wichita State University
The proposed paper
presents findings resulting from an examination of several morphosyntactic
features of Upper Sorbian that are neither shared by other Slavic languages nor
attributable to external (i.e., German or Czech) influences. These
include: a) conflation in the
derivation of possessive forms of feminine nouns (both proper and common) and
that of married women’s surnames, as evidenced by their occurrence in some
serial possessive constructions; b) the apparent conflation or syncretism of
the dative and accusative short forms of the Upper Sorbian reflexive pronoun
(sej, so); c) the use of žadyn ‘no, none’ as an indefinite pronoun or adjective
signifying ‘someone/ anyone, some’; d) variability in the simple negation of
compound verb tenses; and e) the use of forms of the conditional/subjunctive
mood to denote a future-in-the-past in the sentential complements of past-tense
performatives (verba dicendi and verba cogitandi).
This paper is a follow-up to an earlier
one (since accepted and scheduled for publication as a journal article) in that
it presents findings from fieldwork with native speakers of Upper Sorbian
conducted in July–August 2006. Based upon the incipient analyses provided in
the earlier paper, this paper explores the extent to which the identified
morphosyntactic features actually characterize the speech/language use of
contemporary native speakers of Upper Sorbian. The current communicative status
of the cited features will be determined through the use of both written
questionnaires and recorded personal interviews. The Sorbs to be interviewed
will range in age from approximately 25 to 75 years; it is thus expected that
it will be possible to confirm or discount diachronic changes in language use
among several generations of speakers
Title: Imperfectivization in Russian Viewed
through Internet Data
Authors: Irina
Mikaelian, The Pennsylvania State University; Alexei Shmelev, Moscow
Pedagogical State University; Anna Zalizniak, Institute of Linguistics, Russian
Academy of Sciences
Existing works dedicated to Russian
aspect are based on data collected from dictionaries or printed, mostly
literary, texts and on the introspection of the author. However, nowadays, one
cannot avoid using the Russian Internet which contains an unlimited corpus of
texts in Russian. The Internet genre that is of special interest for linguistic
investigations can be called “written colloquial.”
In
this paper, we use Internet data to reconsider the mechanism of
imperfectivization in Russian in order to redefine its scope and its limits.
It
is well known that the morphological imperfectivization is a highly productive
mechanism in Russian. Nevertheless, there exist perfective verbs that do not
have a standard imperfective correlate and are traditionally defined as
perfectiva tantum. Many of these presumably “non convertible” verbs denote
instantaneous events. In spite of the existence of numerous standard
(recognized by dictionaries and grammars) aspectual pairs, such as najti – naxodit′, prijti – prixodit′, uronit′ – ronjat′, the absence of a standard counterpart
for a perfective verb is sometimes explained by its “instantaneous” semantics.
This idea is linked to another strong opinion: that the main feature of the
Russian imperfective aspect is its aptitude to denote a process. Normally, the
standard imperfective counterpart of an instantaneous verb cannot denote a
process in progress, and thus is considered defective. Consequently, the
absence of such a counterpart is considered the normal state of affairs.
The
Internet data disprove this idea: they show that the Russian speaker needs and
regularly forms the officially rejected imperfective correlate for virtually
any “instantaneous” verb, cf. only a small sample of such pairs: ucelet′ – ucelevat′, poskol′znut’sja – poskal′zyvat′sja, ruxnut′ – ruxat′, and even skonchat′sja – skanchivat′sja. These “potential” imperfective
correlates have different frequency and different stylistic status, but there
is no general semantic restriction on this formation.
The
spontaneous imperfectivization is not only limited to unpaired perfective
verbs, but also affects verbs that have a standard, normally non prefixed,
imperfective counterpart, thus increasing the number of “aspectual triplets”
(such as chitat′ – prochitat′ – prochityvat′). We
registered, among others, lomat′ <vetku> - slomat′ – slamyvat′. This
process, apparently, contradicts another tendency of Russian attested
throughout the last century: a number of verbs formed by imperfectivization are
gradually abandoned and replaced by primary imperfective verbs.