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  • Parameters of Slavic aspect by Stephen M. Dickey
  • Edward J. Vajda
Parameters of Slavic aspect. By Stephen M. Dickey. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2000. Pp. xii, 316.

Slavic is (in)famous for its pervasive morphological system of aspectual pairs, a phenomenon that provided the original impetus for studies of aspect in many other families. Yet the derivational nature of Slavic aspect continues to elude the very typological classifications it has done so much to inspire. Part of the problem is that the perfective/imperfective has never before been studied contrastively across all Slavic languages simultaneously. Even studies containing extensive comparative data, such as Herbert Galton’s The main functions of the Slavic verbal aspect (Skopje: Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1976), mistakenly assume that the same aspectual opposition prevails in every Slavic languages.

In this groundbreaking work, Stephen Dickey proves that the concept ‘totality’, thought by many to represent the core perfective meaning throughout all of Slavic, actually characterizes the perfective in only half the family. In the other half, temporal definiteness is paramount. A host of interesting differences in aspectual usage across the various Slavic languages become immediately understandable based on this revelation. D also succeeds brilliantly in demonstrating a fundamental east/west division in the basic nature of the perfective/imperfective opposition. In Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian the perfective conveys temporal definiteness (often accompanied by sequentiality) as its core meaning. The prototypical meaning of the perfective in Czech, Slovak, Slovene, and Sorbian, on the other hand, is totality. Polish and Serbo-Croatian are transitional, with Polish usually pairing with the eastern group, and Serbo-Croatian with the western. D expands upon Anna Stunová’s A contrastive analysis of Russian and Czech aspect: Invariance vs. discourse (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 1993) and strongly vindicates Marja Leinonen’s claim that the Russian perfective is a marker of definiteness (Russian aspect, “temporal’naja lokalizacija” and definiteness/indefiniteness, Helsinki: Neuvostoliittoinstituutti, 1982). Using a wealth of original examples recorded from native informants speaking eight Slavic languages (Belorussian, Macedonian, and Sorbian are included mainly on the basis of descriptions published elsewhere), D shows that this east/west split in the cognitive nature of core aspectual functions has nontrivial consequences in seven areas of language structure.

A preface (ix–xii) lays out the study’s main premise, comparing it to previous treatments of Slavic aspect. Ch. 1, ‘Preliminaries’ (1–48), introduces the cognitive approach taken, which essentially follows Ronald Langacker (Foundations of cognitive grammar, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987–91), while Ch. 9, at the end, provides a summary discussion and suggests possible stages in the development of the two types of aspectual oppositions in Slavic. Each of the remaining seven chapters in between discusses a specific aspectual form or function, revealing the same general east/west dichotomy. Ch. 2, ‘Habitual expressions’ (49–94), shows how the eastern languages normally use the imperfective to express repetition since the perfective lacks temporal definiteness as a core requirement. The western group, however, is free to use the perfective for habitual action since repetition normally involves whole actions. Ch. 3 (95–125) discusses the so-called general factual meaning (reference to a past event out of sequential context); this meaning is normally conveyed by the imperfective only in the eastern group since temporal bounded-ness rather than totality is crucial to the eastern perfective. The same dichotomy appears in how the eastern group uses imperfectives to convey the historical present (Ch. 4, 126–54), running instructions or commentaries (Ch. 5, 155–74), and performative or narrative verbs with meanings such as ‘I thank you’ or ‘It seems to me’ (Ch. 6, 175–202). In all of these cases, the western group tends to use perfectives since each event is presented in its totality. Ch. 7 (203–33) examines the use of the imperfective by the western group to express sequences of events. Finally, Ch. 8 (234–58) discusses different verbal noun formation patterns. Because verbal nouns lose any notion of temporal definiteness, the eastern languages generally derive them from imperfective stems only. The western languages, on the other hand, regularly derive verbal nouns from both perfective and imperfective stems since the corresponding nouns are...

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