Building a Partial Aspect System in East Aukštaitian Vilnius Dialects of Lithuanian: Correlations between Telic and Activity Verbs
Building a Partial Aspect System in East Aukštaitian Vilnius Dialects of Lithuanian: Correlations between Telic and Activity Verbs

Summary/Abstract: This paper is a pilot study based on tape-recorded and transcribed Lithuanian dialectal texts (from the northern part of the East Aukštaitian Vilnius dialect group) to investigate the correlation between telic and activity verbs. We analyzed morphologically correlated (prefixed and unprefixed) verbal stems which are potential members of “gradual-terminative” (GTER) verb pairs. We conclude that the prefixed members of the pairs are ‘perfective’ in the sense that they are restricted to events, whereas the simplex verbs are functionally much less constrained (and thus aspectually diffuse). Nonetheless, this aspectual specialization of prefixed derivatives has not led to a complementary distribution of functions, as it would be required if these productive processes of morphological pairing yielded true aspect pairs.

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