Verbal particles / prefixes and situation aspect.

Eric Corre (1)

1 PRISMES - PRISMES - Langues, Textes, Arts et Cultures du Monde Anglophone - EA 4398

Verbal particles and prefixes and situation aspect. Prepositions and particles are notoriously polysemous and multifunctional across languages. In many Indo-European languages, realized as pre-verbal prefixes or as detachable adpositions, they can have various lexical and /or grammatical functions, one of which is to mark so-called (a)telic aspect at the VP level, and that often goes together with valency-changing effects. The presence of prepositional phrases/particles/prefixes has long been held as one of the factors involved in what is called " aspect shift " , i.e. change of membership from one aspectual class to another, along with the properties of the noun phrase (bare NPs or not) and the presence of time (frame or durative) adverbials. At the sentential level, they may serve another purpose, which is to derive a perfective verb from an imperfective verb: it is the case in Russian. So it appears that particles / prefixes figure prominently among formal markers of aspect. I propose to explore the interaction in this paper. In section 1, I present the data in order to give an idea of the cross-linguistic variation in the use of particles or prefixes across some familiar European languages, mainly English and Russian. In section 2, I review some of the most influential theories of semanctic (lexical) or situation aspect (Smith 1991). Finally, in section 3, I select the two theories (Tenny's MOC and Levin and T. Rapoport's lexical subordination) that can best account for the general phenomena of verb type-shifting induced by particle verbs (pvs) and prefixes, among other elements.

Mots clés: prefixes; particles; lexical aspect; viewpoint aspect

Domaines: Linguistique

Eric Corre. Verbal particles / prefixes and situation aspect.. Faits de langues, 2008, Espace-Temps Anglais. Points de vue, 34. ⟨halshs-01474686⟩