Abstract
Many languages have morphological means for distinguishing between atelic/telic aspectual contrasts associated with related transitive predicates1. For example, it is well-known that the lexicons of Slavic languages contain pervasive patterns of paired predicates. This is exemplified by Russian in (1): (1) a. Včera ja kosil travu yesterday I cut.past grass.acc ‘Yesterday I cut/was cutting (the) grass.’ b. Včera ja skosil tselij gektar yesterday I cut. perfective. past whole hectare.acc ‘Yesterday I cut the whole hectare.’ Roughly speaking, the situation denoted in (1a) need not be construed as fully completed, hence the possibility for a progressive reading, nor need the action be interpreted as directed at a specifically delimitable quantity denoted by the OBJ(ect) argument. In contrast, the situation denoted in (1b) is construed as completed, affecting the entirety of the entity denoted by the OBJ argument. For the time being, I will assume that (1a) corresponds to an atelic reading and (1b) to a telic one (see section 4 for more detailed discussion). As can be seen, while the predicates in each of these sentences vary, they share the same verbal root: this root is unprefixed in (1a), but prefixed in (1b). Crucially, this variability in predicate marking and semantic interpretation is correlated with invariance of OBJ marking: the obj arguments in both (1a) and (1b) bear acc case.
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Ackerman, F. (2003). Aspectual contrasts and lexeme derivation in Estonian: a realization-based morphological perspective. In: Booij, G., Van Marle, J. (eds) Yearbook of Morphology 2003. Yearbook of Morphology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-1513-7_2
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