Aspectual Morphemes as Verb Classifiers in Slavic and Non-Slavic Languages

This paper was presented at the Slavic Linguistics Society Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington on September 19 2014.

Abstract:

Janda et al. (2013) propose an analysis of Russian aspectual prefixes as verb classifiers, arguing that the prefix which forms the 'natural perfective' from a given verb serves to classify that verb according to its semantic characteristics. This analysis contrasts with the traditional analysis of Russian aspect, described by Tixonov (1998) and others, in which natural perfectives are formed via the addition of 'empty' prefixes which contribute no semantic content of their own. In Tohono O’odham (formerly known as Papago, an Uto-Aztecan language spoken in present-day Arizona and Mexico), as in Russian, there is a broad two-way distinction between two aspects, perfective and imperfective (Saxton 1982:232). In a fashion similar to the traditional aspectological assumption that there are lexically empty perfectivizing prefixes in Russian, traditional analyses of O’odham aspect posit a process of lexically empty perfectivization. In O’odham, the perfective is usually considered to be formed from the imperfective by truncation of the final consonant, in large part due to a lack of clear and separable semantic content in that segment (Mason 1950; Hale 1965; Saxton 1982; Zepeda 1983; Hill & Zepeda 1992; Kosa 2008). In this paper, I argue instead that O’odham imperfective verbs are formed from perfective verbs by suffixation, and that the suffixes involved are not ‘empty’, but serve a verb-classifying function similar to that of aspectual prefixes in Russian. Imperfectivizing suffixes have been proposed in the literature, by Dolores (1913) and Stonham (1994), but this hypothesis has not yet been systematically investigated. This paper represents a first attempt to do so. Data for this study are drawn from a nearly 5,000-verb database created from a two-volume dictionary of Tohono O’odham usage (Mathiot 1973a; 1973b). A preliminary analysis of these verbs supports a correlation between the final consonant of the imperfective and the verb’s lexical semantics, demonstrating that like those of Russian, O’odham aspectual morphemes fulfill the criteria for a verb classifier system as described by McGregor (2002), and providing further evidence that research on Slavic aspect can inform typological studies of verbal aspect cross-linguistically.