Базична опозиция дїєсловного вида
Basic Opposition of Verbal Aspect

Summary/Abstract: After a critical review of the standpoints of Ruthenian grammarians who considered that the basic opposition of verbal aspect is between perfectivity (completeness) and imperfectivity (in-completeness) author argues for the establishment of new verbal category – aktionsart and consideres that the basic opposition of the verbal aspect is between totivity and atotivity. Aspect has been defined as a grammaticalised expression of viewing the realization of a verb situation as totive or non-totive. The totive mode conveys the realization of a verb situation as a whole; the non-totive mode conveys the realization of a verb situation as a structure, comprising several meanings concerning structure such as ”process”, ”on going activity”, ”duration”, ”unlimitedness”, ”incompletness”, etc. In the paper the author discusses the category of aktionsart as well and points to the distinction between aktionsart meanings and aspectual meanings. The introduction of the category of aktionsart proves to be quite useful for explaining the resistance of stative verbs to form aspectual pairs in Ruthenian. The stative verbs present an exception in Ruthenian aspectual because of their semantic features +stativity and -telicity.

• Details
• Contents