[Sem SynSem] Sergei Tatevosov (Moscow State University)

Sergei Tatevosov (Moscow State University)

A few reflections on the event structure of Slavic verbs

This presentations addresses two main topics.

One is the event structure of basic morphosyntactic types of verbs and their extended projections. These are morphologically simplex verbs like čita(t’) ‘read’ in Russian and their lexically prefixed counterparts like pro-čita(t’) ‘read’ or za- pro-čita(t’) ‘read aloud’ Relying on the idea circulating in the literature since Klein 1995, I present a few pieces of data (including scope of adverbials like ‘almost’, interpretation under negation, argument realization patterns)  that argue for a higher subevental complexity of (lexically) prefixed configurations compared to morphologically simplex configurations. I argue that in event-semantic terms, the former are to be analyzed as relations between events and result states, where a result state is a uniform semantic contribution of prefixation.

The other topic is a typology of such relations, which reduces to a typology of lexical verbal prefixes. I will suggest, partly replying on the observations and generalizations from Romanova 2007, that a crucial parameter defining such a typology is a set-theoretic relation between two sets of states. One is the set of states in the extension of a prefix. The other is the set of lexically projected result states, i.e. states brought about by culminating eventualities in the original extension of a verb stem. Evidence for the proposal comes from the entailment patterns connecting prefixed and non-prefixed verbal configurations.