Investigations of Polish, Czech and Russian Aspect on the Basis of Corpora and Databases (a First Summary on a Topic) Cover Image

Badania aspektu w językach polskim, czeskim i rosyjskim za pomocą korpusów i baz danych (pierwsze podsumowanie tematu)
Investigations of Polish, Czech and Russian Aspect on the Basis of Corpora and Databases (a First Summary on a Topic)

Author(s): Björn Wiemer, Joanna Wrzesień-Kwiatkowska, Marek Łaziński
Subject(s): Language studies, Language and Literature Studies, Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Western Slavic Languages, Eastern Slavic Languages, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: aspect; verbal prefixes; aspect triplets; electronic corpora; annotation schemata;

Summary/Abstract: The article is connected to the project “DiAsPol250” in which Polish is compared to Czech and Russian from the perspective of the evolution of their aspect systems (http://www.diaspol.uw.edu. pl/). We make use of existing synchronic and diachronic electronic corpora and are building a corpus of our own with annotated aspect pairs; we also create a database of aspect triplets whose role we consider as particularly important for the system. We want to assess which changes have occurred since the mid-18th century in prefixing and suffixing strategies of verb stems, both in general and by comparing particular prefixes and suffixes, especially so-called natural (vs. specialized) prefixes (according to Janda et al., 2013). The article supplies a sketch of the general premises of the project, and it summarizes our experience with existing large corpora and databases which we have been employing. We also present a case study in order to demonstrate a procedure designed to compare the distribution of the Czech prefix z- in triplets and in the corpus. This procedure is meant to check more general tendencies; it also illustrates why electronic corpora cannot be replaced in research on distributional properties and why their role does not consist simply in providing examples for the illustration of hypotheses.

  • Issue Year: 2020
  • Issue No: 7
  • Page Range: 45-58
  • Page Count: 14
  • Language: Polish
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