Morphological Manifestations of Aspect in Slavic

Abstract

AbstractThis entry is a survey on aspectual distinctions that are usually assumed to be morphologically encoded in Slavic languages. While it is true that morphology seems to bear an intimate connection with aspect, the precise nature of this connection is very difficult to formulate as a strict generalization without any exceptions (or even with a few well‐defined ones). In fact such a generalization is still absent after many decades of research dedicated to aspectual morphology, as this entry demonstrates. The existing attempts to capture the role of morphology in Slavic aspect suffer from empirical imprecision and resist a systematic explanation. In this entry, after a brief introduction in Section 1, the reader will be reminded of the main morphological processes that are usually considered to be aspectual in nature, that is, are taken to affect the aspectual value of the lexical verb they are attached to (Section 2). After that, the entry will discuss in more detail two main morphological processes that seem to influence directly the aspectual value of a verb: prefixation (Section 3.1) and suffixation (Section 3.2). Section 4 will reassess the fundamental question of whether morphology really reflects aspectual differences at a semantic level and discuss an alternative to the well‐established view that certain morphological processes directly encode aspectual distinctions. Section 5 concludes the entry.