Actionality and affixation of biaspectual verbs in Croatian in the light of formal–functional theory of verbal aspect
Actionality and affixation of biaspectual verbs in Croatian in the light of formal–functional theory of verbal aspect

Summary/Abstract: Slavic verbal aspect is obligatorily morphologically expressed in the infinitive and infinite verbal forms as one of two opposing values: perfective or imperfective. Additionally, Slavic languages also have biaspectual verbs. If no context is provided, the infinitive of such a verb has the potential to express both aspectual values. In order to achieve greater communicational transparency, however, native speakers sometimes use affixation to derive overtly aspectually marked verbs from biaspectual verbs. Still, not all biaspectual verbs are equally prone to affixation. Moreover, some aspectologists suggest that the type of aspectual affixation seems to depend on the inner actional properties of a verb, not only in the case of biaspectual verbs but in general. That assumption is the starting point for this study of biaspectual verbs and their affixation. This paper addresses the following research question: Do morphologically stable (without any overtly aspectually marked derivatives) and unstable (with overtly aspectually marked derivatives) biaspectual verbs differ on the lexical level, i.e., are their actional properties significantly different? The analysis was conducted on a sample of 38 biaspectual verbs. First, lexical meanings for each analyzed verb were compared and extracted from three dictionaries of contemporary Croatian. Second, a lexical–actional function (actional class) was assigned to each meaning according to a classification proposed within the formal–functional theory of Slavic aspect (Lehmann 1999a, 2009a). In the last step the Fisher exact test was performed. The statistical analysis suggests that the actional properties of morphologically stable and unstable biaspectual verbs differ significantly.

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