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The aspectual triplets of putat’: the Telicity Hypothesis and two ways to test it

Аспектуальные тройки глагола путать: гипотеза предельности и два способа ее проверки

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Abstract

Traditionally, aspectual pairs have been considered the cornerstone of the Russian aspectual system, but in recent years, aspectual triplets have received considerable attention. Triplets are constellations of one perfective and two imperfectives, such as množit’sja / umnožit’sja / umnožat’sja ‘multiply’. The present article is a case study of four triplets associated with the verb putat’ ‘confuse’, which focuses on the ‘Telicity Hypothesis’, the idea that the Primary Imperfective is used to describe atelic meaning, while the Secondary Imperfective is used to describe telic meaning. Two ways of testing this hypothesis involving syntactic contexts and what is referred to as ‘pair strength’ are proposed, and it is shown that both tests lend support to the hypothesis.

Аннотация

Традиционно видовые пары считаются наиболее центральной категорией русской видовой системы. Однако в последние годы существенное внимание уделяется видовым тройкам типа множиться / умножиться / умножаться, где один глагол совершенного вида соотнесен с двумя глаголами несовершенного вида. Данная статья представляет собой детальный анализ четырех видовых троек, включающих в себя бесприставочный глагол путать. Цель анализа состоит в том, чтобы проверить ‘гипотезу предельности’, согласно которой бесприставочный (первичный) глагол несовершенного вида выражает непредельное значение, а приставочный (вторичный) глагол совершенного вида выражает предельность. Для проверки гипотезы рассматриваются два фактора: типичные конструкции, в которых используются два типа глаголов несовершенного вида, а также так называемая ‘сила видовой пары’. Результаты анализа поддерживают гипотезу предельности.

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Notes

  1. I use ‘telicity’ in the same way as Comrie (1976, pp. 44–48). See also Smith (1991).

  2. www.emptyprefixes.uit.no.

  3. The Russian National Corpus (RNC) is available at www.ruscorpora.ru.

  4. Prefix meanings are given in small caps.

  5. http://www.ng.ru/events/2003-09-11/1_platov.html (23 February 2017).

  6. The constructions in Table 6 involve the following abbreviations: V (verb), NPnom (noun phrase in the nominative), NPacc (noun phrase in the accusative), NPgen (noun phrase in the genitive) and ADV (adverb). The element ‘do’ is a transliteratation of the Russian prefix do, here ‘until’.

  7. Kuznetsova largely relies on the labeling proposed by Apresjan and Pall (1982).

  8. Note that I have used the label ‘NPnom’ in some constructions without an overt subject in the nominative. Sentences like Žerebjat možno ne putat’ ‘There’s no need to tie up the foals’ are thus labeled as ‘NPnom V NPacc’.

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Nordrum, M. The aspectual triplets of putat’: the Telicity Hypothesis and two ways to test it. Russ Linguist 41, 239–260 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-017-9179-z

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