Actionality and affixation of biaspectual verbs in Croatian

Actionality – coded in the lexical root of a verb – is a feature common to all languages (cf. Breu 1980: 115; Lehmann 1992: 3f). As well as actionality, Slavic languages additionally have morphologically expressed verbal aspect. It is expressed in the infinitive and in all finite verbal forms and has two values: perfective (PFV) or imperfective (IPFV) (e.g. dati_pfv → davati_ipfv ‘to give’; čitati_ipfv → ‘pročitati_pfv ‘to read).

However, besides PFV and IPFV verbs, Slavic languages also have biaspectual verbs (BVs). Roughly speaking, if no context is provided, the infinitive of such a verb has the potential to express both aspectual values without any further aspectual affixation (e.g. kopirati_BV ‘to copy’). Nevertheless, on the sentence level only one aspectual value is being realized. Therefore, in order to achieve communicational transparency native speakers sometimes use affixation to derive overtly aspectually marked verbs from BVs (cf. Avilova 1968: 66; Silić & Pranjković 2007: 49; Veselý 2010: 121). Nevertheless, not all BVs are equally prone to affixation. Moreover, the type of affixation seems to depend on their inner actional properties. Isačenko (1960: 145) and Maslov (1984: 87) noticed, and Piperski (2016) later corroborated that some BVs tend more to the PFV, and others to the IPFV pole.

            Various factors influencing affixation of BVs are cited in the literature, including semantics (Mučnik 1966: 68) and the actional properties of the base BV (Avilova 1968: 66; Šeljakin 1983: 149). The claim that telicity is an essential semantic feature tightly associated with biaspectuality is a starting point of my research. In this paper I address the following research question: Do morphologically stable (without any overtly aspectually marked derivatives) and unstable (with overtly aspectually marked derivatives) BVs differ on the lexical level, i.e. are their actional properties significantly different?

The analysis is conducted on sample of 37 BVs. The data are extracted from three dictionaries of contemporary Croatian (Matasović & Jojić 2002; Birtić et al. 2013; Jojić et al. 2015) and analyzed in R (R Core Team 2016) using the Fisher exact test.

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