Book section : Chapter
Secondary imperfectives are primary imperfectives: an empirical investigation of potentially imperfective verbs in Old Church Slavonic
- Abstract:
- This chapter discusses two groups of potentially imperfective verbs in Old Church Slavonic: 1) so-called “secondary imperfectives”, i.e. prefixed suffix-derived verbs with prefixed, apparently perfective partners (načinati, načęti ‘begin’), and 2) simplex verbs partnered by prefixed, apparently perfective verbs (pьsati, napьsati ‘write’). The verb pairs are identified by their ability to translate single Greek verb lemmas. The question is explored by comparing the linguistic behaviour of these two groups. Both the tense-mood distribution and the semantics of the verbs are compared. The data show that there are clear distributional differences, where paired prefixed derivates overwhelmingly occur in viewpoint-imperfective and neutral tense-mood forms, while this is much less true for paired simplices, which generally seem more independent of their prefixed partners. The semantic differences between the two types of verbs are more subtle—both types are used to express both continuous and habitual semantics, but paired prefixed derivates seem more likely to be used to describe iterative (actually repeated) events. It therefore seems likely that the paired prefixed derivates were grammaticalised as imperfective first, with a full range of the usual imperfective readings.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Accepted manuscript, pdf, 398.4KB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1163/9789004731622_004
Authors
- Publisher:
- Brill
- Host title:
- The Slavic Verb Part 2: Language-Specific Perspectives
- Pages:
- 45-77
- Chapter number:
- 3
- Series:
- Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics
- Series number:
- 49
- Place of publication:
- Leiden / Boston
- Publication date:
- 2025-12-08
- Edition:
- 1
- DOI:
- ISSN:
-
0169-0124
- EISBN:
- 9789004731622
- ISBN-10:
- 9004731601
- ISBN-13:
- 9789004731608
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Subtype:
-
Chapter
- Pubs id:
-
2287512
- Local pid:
-
pubs:2287512
- Deposit date:
-
2025-09-11
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Kamphuis et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2026
- Rights statement:
- © 2026 by Jaap Kamphuis, Egbert Fortuin and Simeon Dekker. Published by Koninklijke Brill BV, Plantijnstraat 2, 2321 JC Leiden, The Netherlands.
- Notes:
- This is the accepted manuscript version of the chapter. The final version is available online from Brill at https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004731622_004
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