Factors contributing to prefixation of biaspectual verbs in Croatian

Abstract

One of the distinctive features of Slavic verbs is their aspectual morphology: typically each finite and non-finite form of a verb has a constant aspectual value: either perfective (PFV) or imperfective (IPFV). Nevertheless, in all Slavic languages, besides these prototypical verbs with only one assigned aspectual value, there are also verbs with underspecified aspectual value, usually called biaspectual verbs (BVs). As argued in the literature, on the sentence level such verbs have the potential to express both aspectual values, PFV and IPFV, without any further aspectual affixation. However, some scholars assert that the intended aspectual value of such verbs can rarely be unambiguously signaled. To resolve the ambiguous aspectual value, native speakers often provide additional context signals or derive a new aspectually defined verb to indicate the intended aspectual value. The latter possibility has been addressed in numerous papers, but mainly with the goal of detecting the (most common) prefixes used in this process. This study aimed to examine the patterns behind BV prefixation in Croatian. In order to detect factors with a statistically significant impact on prefixation of BVs in Croatian, a random stratified sample of 237 Croatian BVs (BVs of Slavic origin and biaspectual borrowings) was compiled. The data regarding the existence of perfective derivatives were extracted from three different corpora of contemporary Croatian and one subcorpus: the Croatian National Corpus, the Croatian Language Repository, and the Croatian Web Corpus and its subcorpus Forum, and afterwards analyzed using R software with the help of the lme4 package. The results obtained with the generalized linear mixed model revealed five factors statistically significant for prefixation of BVs in Croatian, which can be attributed to the lexical (semantical), morphological and sociolinguistic domains.