Slavic aspect and (diachronic) corpora
online, March, 29-31, 2021
Ze względu na pandemię warsztaty planowane na marzec 2020 r. odbędą się online w dniach 29-31 marca 2021 r.
Zoom (link valid for all three days)
Topic: Slavic aspect and (diachronic) corpora
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82808864486?pwd=MGdCR01nZUYvelNFclg3TGZicXRXUT09
Meeting-ID: 828 0886 4486
Code: 212947
PRESENTATIONS:
DiAsPol Team
Björn Wiemer, Slavic aspect and (diachronic) corpora. Attempting a survey
Marco Biasio, Playing Hide and Seek, or the Qualitative Side of the Aspect-Modality Interplay (Old Russian and Old Serbian Case Studies)
Anna Ptentsova, Доумати (dumati) and съдоумати (sъdumati): are theya perfect aspectual pair?
Marek Łaziński et al., Tagging aspect pairs in the German-Polish Parallel Corpus
Björn Wiemer et al., The DiAsPol database of aspect triplets
This workshop is organized in connection with the DFG/NCN-financed project DiAsPol250 (see http://www.diaspol.uw.edu.pl/eng/). It addresses desiderata in the corpus-based study of Slavic aspect, which are felt primarily in diachronic research, and aims at uniting the expertise of specialists in the field of Slavic aspectology, Slavic (diachronic) morphosyntax as well as of corpus and computer linguistics. We want to support cross-fertilization among these domains and to explore to which extent experience from research in contemporary stages of Slavic aspect (and related domains) can be applied to earlier periods.
The diachronic study of aspect (pfv. : ipfv. opposition) in Slavic languages has remained a stepchild of Slavic aspectology and of research in morphosyntax and semantics. Although there are quite a few studies on the development of aspect in Russian (and its predecessors, e.g. Bermel 1997, Ševeleva 2010) as well as on Old Church Slavonic (e.g., Eckhoff/Haug 2015, Kamphuis 2016), other Slavic languages lag behind. Probably, one of the reasons is that diachronic corpora of particular Slavic languages have started to appear only very recently; most of them are rather small (see, for instance, http://rhssl1.uni-regensburg.de/SlavKo/korpus/poldi and http://www.f19.uw.edu.pl/), or they are not sufficiently annotated and/or lack an interface for queries that would be manageable also for persons without special skills in computer science. Exceptions are the diachronic part of the RNC (http://www.ruscorpora.ru/), and the recently lanced Korpus Barokowy of Polish (KorBa: http://korba.edu.pl/query_corpus/). The PROIEL and TOROT treebanks (https://nestor.uit.no/users/sign_in , https://proiel.github.io/) are richly annotated, but rather for PoS and syntax (see their Old Church Slavonic and older East Slavic parts). Currently, and for the first time, a consistent annotation of aspect pairs is being developed for a Slavic language, namely Polish, in the DiAsPol250 project.
Another reason for retardation in the diachronic, corpus-based investigation of Slavic aspect possibly lies in the fact that neither the functional distribution of verbs considered pfv. or ipfv., nor even the formal patterns which mark the relation between pfv. and ipfv. stems can be easily retrieved. The same holds true for other issues somehow related to aspect, such as the syntactic coding of arguments (e.g., the locative alternation) or prefix stacking. So far corpus-based research in the productivity of patterns of the derivation of ipfv. and pfv. stems, or in the distribution of particular grammatical forms interfering with aspect, has been conducted almost entirely on a synchronic level (an exception is Gorbova 2015), which, again, has practically been restricted to Russian (cf. Janda/Lyashevskaya 2011, Janda et al. 2013, Gorbova 2019), an exception being Łaziński (2011). A similar remark holds true for research into the relation between aspect, actionality, argument structure and quantification (cf. Anstatt 2003) or for derivational chains and prefix stacking (cf. Tatevosov 2009). Likewise, alignment changes, such as locative alternations, have been studied for patterns of prefixation (cf. Sokolova 2012, also Sokolova/Lewandowski 2010 for a Russian-Polish comparison), but aspect has remained in the background, in particular as concerns the role of unprefixed stems in so-called triplets (compare Russ. gruzit’ ‘load’ in relation to za-, na– and po-gruzit’ and their ipfv. suffixed derivatives); for a first step in this direction cf. the unpublished pilot study Nichols (2012).
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We invite contributions addressing issues related to the development of aspect systems in Slavic languages on the basis of corpus data (or comparable databases). This implies interference with other verbal categories, with notional categories on sentence or discourse level (e.g., modality, presupposition management) and with the morphosyntactic coding of argument structure. Studies on recent or ongoing change are also very welcome, in particular if they deal with the first of the issues specified below. Thus, we invite talks which are concerned primarily, though not exclusively, with at least one of the following issues:
- How can productivity of aspectual derivation (prefixation, suffixation), both of assumed pairs and of derivational chains (e.g. prefix stacking), be measured on type or token level? Can methods applied to corpora of contemporary stages be transferred to earlier stages?
- As a counterpart to the previous question, how can we assess the weight of phenomena that are regarded either as marginal or as remnants of earlier stages, such as unprefixed stems (simplicia) and their role in so-called triplets (Russ. trojki)? How can corpus-based studies help to better understand how triplets came about, why some decayed, while others haved „stayed alive“?
- Since corpora are an indispensable tool in determining token frequency, how can we detect and explain discrepancies of type/token ratios, e.g. if we compare the share of different actionality or lexical groups for productive and unproductive patterns of aspectual derivation? How can corpora be used to better explore biases in the distribution of particular verbs groups over acknowledged functions of ipfv. or pfv. verbs?
- How can corpora help to pin down frequency effects (on token or type level) responsible for the survival of rare patterns, or for the spread of patterns restricted to certain actionality types (e.g., semelfactives suffixed with {*nǫ})?
- How can corpora be employed to better understand changes in the relation of aspect choice with various modal meanings, in clause combining and discourse patterns?
- How can corpora help to better understand the relation of derivational patterns (affixation) and aspect choice with patterns (and their changes) in the coding of arguments?
Abstracts clearly specifying the research questions, the data used and the expected results should contain maximally 500 words (exclusive of examples, glossing and references) and the author’s affiliation. They are to be sent by July, 20th, 2019 to Björn Wiemer (wiemerb@uni-mainz.de) and Marek Łaziński (m.lazinski@uw.edu.pl). Notes of acceptance will be sent by September, 15, 2019.
For all questions, feel free to write to one of these addresses as well.
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References
Anstatt, Tanja. 2003: Aspekt, Argumente und Verbklassen im Russischen. Tübingen (unpubl. postdoctoral thesis).
Bermel, Neil. 1997: Context and the lexicon in the development of Russian aspect. Berkeley.
Eckhoff, Hanne & Dag Haug. 2015: Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic. Diachronica 32-2, 186-230.
Gorbova, Elena V. 2015: Vidoobrazovanie russkogo glagola: prefiksacija i/ili suffiksacija? Voprosy jazykoznanija 2015-1, 7-38.
Gorbova, Elena V. 2019: Imperfektiviruemost’ russkix pristavočnyx perfektivov (na primere pro– i u-glagolov). Voprosy jazykoznanija 2019-1, 58-74.
Janda, Laura A. & Olga Lyashevskaja. 2011: Grammatical profiles and the interaction of the lexicon with aspect, tense, and mood in Russian. Cognitive Linguistics 22-4, 719-763.
Janda, Laura A., Anna Endresen, Julia Kuznetsova, Olga Lyashevskaya, Anastasia Makarova, Tore Nesset & Svetlana Sokolova. 2013: Why Russian Aspectual Prefixes Aren’t Empty (Prefixes As Verbal Classifiers). Bloomington (Indiana).
Kamphuis, Jaap. 2016: Verbal aspect in Old Church Slavonic. Leiden (unpubl. PhD thesis).
Łaziński, Marek. 2011: Polish aspectual prefixes, their order and functions: A study based on the National Corpus of Polish. Word Structure 4-2, 231-243.
Nichols, Johanna. 2012: Prefixation and the locative alternation in Slavic. (Handout of a talk delivered at the University of Zurich.)
Sokolova, Svetlana. 2012: Asymmetries in Linguistic Construal (Russian Prefixes and the Locative Alternation). Tromsø (unpubl. PhD thesis).
Sokolova, Svetlana & Wojciech Lewandowski. 2010: Constructional profile of the verbal prefix za-: a comparative study of Russian and Polish. In: Grønn, A. & I. Marijanovic (eds): Russian in Contrast (= Oslo Studies in Language 2-2), 365-391.
Ševeleva, Maria N. 2010. Vtoričnye imperfektivy s suffiksom –yva-/-iva– v letopisjax XII-XVI vv. Russkij jazyk v naučnom osveščenii 20-2, 200-243.
Tatevosov, Sergej G. 2009: Množestvennaja prefiksacija i anatomija russkogo glagola. In: Kiseleva, Ksenija L. et al. (eds.): Korpusnye issledovanija po russkoj grammatike. Moskva, 92-156.