Aspectual cycles and inner-Slavic variation

• Applicants: Dr. Petr Biskup; Professor Dr. Olav Mueller-Reichau
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 498343796

The project is going to investigate variations in the aspectual derivation of Slavic predicates. It focuses on the following aspectual markers: iterative suffixes, verbal prefixes, semelfactive suffixes and secondary imperfective suffixes. It explores where these morphemes occur in the derivational system, what their structural status is, how they are linearized, what their meaning is and how Slavic languages differ in these respects. It is also concerned with the question of how the aspectual markers interact, i.e. it deals with the evergreen question of derivational histories (Karcevskij 1927, Isačenko 1962): with the relation between perfective and imperfective predicates from the synchronic word-formation point of view. It investigates Russian, Polish and Czech and makes the working assumption that Slavic languages employ two cycles in the verb structure building. The first (lower) cycle determines the kind of the event and structurally corresponds to the verbal domain, with the aspectual phrase on top, encoding the morphological aspect. The secondary imperfective morpheme may realize the aspectual head and indicate that the first cycle is finished. The second aspectual cycle – structurally above the aspectual phrase – hosts affixes that pluralize and modify aspectual and temporal properties of the output of the first cycle. The project will explore intra-language as well as inter-language variability in the morphosyntactic, semantic and phonological realization of the aspectual phrase and the secondary imperfective suffix. It is also concerned with the variable positioning of aspectual markers wrt. the boundary between the two aspectual cycles (the aspectual phrase) and with the question of how this positioning relates to biaspectuality of complex verbs and to the simultaneous interpretation of coordinated prefixed verbs. Further, it scrutinizes what happens aspectually in less complex structures like participles and nominalizations. The project is of great importance to the field of aspectology since it deals with two basic questions of the aspectual research: 1. How is perfectivity/imperfectivity of Slavic predicates encoded? 2. How does the aspectual value change in the process of word formation, i.e. in the derivational history? Given that the project will analyze derivational histories from the perspective of all three main linguistic levels – morphosyntax, semantics and phonology – and will conduct a full morphematic analysis of Slavic predicates, it can shed light on the recently-observed mismatches between the place of particular aspectual markers in the word and their (possibly) dissociated interpretation. Since the project investigates the place and the order of aspectual markers in the derivation, its results will also have important consequences for the field of typology. E.g. Cinque’s (1999) universalistic approach to clausal structure will be challenged if the three Slavic languages display different orders in prefix stacking.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants