Russian Verb Categories Of Aspect And Degree Of Duration Systemic Analysis

The function of grammar and its categories in language system

In the light of systemic ideas grammar should be defined as a system of auxiliary senses which are necessary and sufficient for informational value of utterance in a language of a certain type in its concrete communicative conditions. These caused by systemic determinant of a given language regularly expressed auxiliary senses can be named grammar categories of the language. Grammar category, become a conventional sense of specialised meanings and relevant forms, is a formal category. Grammar category is organized as a system of meanings, which of them is “a communicatively meaningful generalized image” (Melnikov, 1978, p. 321), specialized for expressing of the category.

The systemic theory of language comes from the statement that a complex of categories of a language is not arbitrary but based on internal determinant of language system. The internal determinant is based in its turn on external language determinant. The concept of internal and external determinants was elaborated by Melnikov in his linguistic publications of 1960-90 years and systematized in a book prepared on the base of the doctor thesis of 1990 (Melnikov, 2003). External determinant is a complex of societal factors relevant to conditions of communication is a certain linguistic society. Internal determinant is its communicative perspective as a main factor of all language substantial, structural, and functional peculiarities. The notion of the internal determinant is a concretization of W. von Humboldt’s idea of “inner form of language”

Lipatova (2016, p. 29) noticed that in systemic linguistic the norm of inner form of inflective languages is a representation of any message in a picture of a developing event.

Aspect and degree of duration

Pavskij was the first who opened specifics of Russian verbal categories, described aspect as a meaning of 3 degrees of an action, and put this category in the center of Russian verb system. His idea is illustrated in table 1.

Pavskij also offered to differ some semantic aspects of degree of an action: 1) a degree of force, 2) a degree of spatial latitude, 3) a degree of duration, 4) a degree of proximity ‒ apartness. This concept of verbal degree can be defined as spatial-temporal system of meanings.

Nekrasov gave another ‒ purely temporal concept of verbal degree. He viewed aspect forms as variants of one verbal lexeme as it is shown in table 2.

These ideas of Pavskij and Nekrasov further developed by Potebnja, who gave a deep and comprehensive survey of all previous theories of Russian verb, offered to differ categories of aspect and duration and analyzed formal and semantic relations of verbs of different degree

The degree of duration

The inflectional system was formed only in the Indo-European languages, but only the Slavic languages ​​retained and developed the original inflectional structure of the Indo-European system. Therefore, the binary grammatical category of the aspect, which was formed only in Slavic languages, must be considered as a consequence of the eventual internal form of inflectional languages ​​in the most developed stage of development of inflectional language.

The grammatical system of Slavic languages ​​developed in such a direction that the emerging grammatical categories, especially verb categories, contributed to the ever more complete correspondence of the scheme of the nominative meaning of the utterance to the canon of the developing event, preparing the appearance of the category of the aspect.

In order to bring the nominative meaning of the statement to the canon of a developing event when performing any communicative plan, already at the initial stages of the formation of the Indo-European system, signs with a material meaning are split into nouns and verbs to indicate the most important characteristics of the simplest event: who or what is changing, what is this change. The opposition of a noun and a verb even at the stage of the common Indo-European system was formally expressed at the level of the construction of roots: the proto-verbal root was most often represented by a syllable with an e-shaped vowel, and to express varieties of nominal semantics with the same consonant composition, a mutation based on reduction, lengthening or labialization of the root vowel: ‘I take’, ‘selection’, ‘collection’, ‘to collect’.

In the eventful presentation of the content of the utterance, it was necessary to express the spatial and temporal characteristics of the event, and for this it was necessary to establish a reliably identifiable common origin of coordinates. Therefore, as the core of an utterance with an eventful inner form, not only the verbal root, as a sign of the initial dynamics of the event, had to be formed, but also morphemes - clarifiers of its dynamic parameters. The personal conjugation specifies from whom the initial impulse emanates and binds the named utterance to the referential event ‒ to the act of speaking with its obvious spatial and temporal characteristics. First, a personal athematic conjugation is formed, reflecting the spatial characteristics of the named event, then thematic conjugation is formed. The thematic morpheme indicates that the initial impulse of the described event proceeds against the background of an act of communication observed and carried out by the communicants themselves. The thematic affix also emphasizes the spatial parameters of the event, which are implicitly consistent with the temporal ones ‒ the speaking situation. Therefore, the main grammatical opposition of the Slavic verbal system "present tense ‒ aorist" expressed not so much the time of the event as it was, as the place: the events taking place here and there, that is, outside the field of communication.

To emphasize the difference in the duration of "local" events, forms of imperfect develop, and this has led to the mobilization of means of emphasizing duration in present tense. Proto-nominal roots begin to be drawn into the system, which receive a secondary, verbal function, which is indicated by the introduction of special affixes into the word form, expressing the degree of duration of the action indicated by the verb, emphasizing its increase or decrease in comparison with the original duration, expressed by the word form with a proto-verbal root. Absence of an affix of duration in the original word form began to be perceived as the presence of a zero affix of duration.

Initially, the spatial characteristics of the named event are grammaticalized. The temporal parameters of the named event are first expressed implicitly, and grammaticalized much later. Moreover, at first the absolute time coordinate indicated not when, but for how long, and the relative coordinate was expressed implicitly ‒ through the spatial reference of the named event with the reference event, the speaking situation. At the same time, the events taking place here were correlated with the current course, and the events taking place there were perceived only as spatially distant. In the systemic typology of languages, such ambiguity is interpreted as a possible reason for the loss of the aorist and imperfect and the development of verb forms that express the actual past and proper future tense in relation to the moment of speaking.

The formal expression of temporal characteristics began to form the means of opposing verb forms according to the degree of duration of the named action as the nucleus of the depicted event. Therefore, the opposition of verb forms in terms of the degree of duration and the difference between the duration they designate from the original word form with a proto-verbal root formed the basis for the formation of all subsequent verbal and verbal-based oppositions in the course of tuning the Slavic language system in accordance with the eventual inner form. So are the functions, means and meaning the category of the aspect, which is interpreted as a result of the transition of the Slavic languages ​​to a higher degree of attunement of linguistic technology to reflect the developing event, cannot be established without taking into account the content and means of opposing verbs according to the degree of duration they denotePlease replace this text with context of your paper.

The relationship between the degrees of the duration of the verb and the aspect

Degree of duration changes develop into aspectual changes. Five gradations of duration, the need to distinguish which was substantiated by Melnikov, are expressed by five power suffixes: -н-, -ø-, -ѣ-, -a-, -ва- [-n-, -ø-, -ѣ-, -a-, -va] where the left consonant suffix signals a decrease in the degree of duration in comparison with the original form, and the right vocal suffixes with an increasing degree of vocality indicate that the resulting duration of the action expressed by the verb increases (Melnikov, 1997, p. 136). Depending on the semantics of the root and the presence of prefixes at one stage or another, there is an aspectual boundary that divides the duration series of verbs into two zones. In one zone there are perfective verbs, and in the other - imperfective verbs. If the same prefix is ​​added to each verb of the duration series, then the semantics of these verbs will narrow and the degree of expressed duration will decrease, which means that the aspectual boundary will shift towards the expansion of the zone of the perfect form due to the narrowing of the zone of the imperfect form. And vice versa: if a certain verb needs to be transferred to the imperfective zone, then the duration suffix of this verb must be changed to suffixes of increasing duration of the verb action until the verb has crossed the aspectual border.

Potebnja considered a verb in Slavic languages ​​to be the minimum of a sentence. A sentence in the Slavic language, as follows from an event-based communicative perspective, gives a picture of a developing event, in which the verb form (especially personal) through the meaning of the person names the initiator of the event, the meanings of the prefixes call the presence of actions of some other participants in the event, the degree of verb duration is the time of the event, verb tense ‒ precedence, coincidence or adherence of the named event to the moment of speech. Thus, the content of the word form of the Slavic verb is the content of a micro drama, with a set, culmination and denouement.

A perfect aspect gives an image of eventful completion, that is, a micro drama that has a set and culmination ends with a denouement. But the meaning of perfection is not always the same:

– a perfection is related to the initiator of the event and is related to the beginning of the event.

– a perfection is correlated with the patient of the event, with the direct object.

–a perfection corresponds to the temporal interval and coincides with the end of the event.

Now it is clear that the perfection of the eventful content of the sentence is combined with both the incompleteness and the completion of the event expressed by the sentence. Thus, the concepts of perfection and complete completeness are independent. The perfect form expresses not performance, completeness, not limit, not integrity (although it can implicitly express these characteristics of the event referred to), but draws an image of eventful perfection, that is, an image of a micro drama with a setting, culmination and an obligatory denouement.

The determinant approach in the study of one of the most complex grammatical categories, to which the category of the aspect in the Slavic languages ​​belongs, allows us to see a chain of interconnected logically grounded patterns in what seemed to be undefined, scattered and even chaotic.

The category of the aspect, like other grammatical categories, was formed in the inflectional Slavic languages ​​in accordance with their internal determinant: so that the scheme of the nominative meaning of the utterance most fully corresponds to the canon of the developing event.

In the course of the determinantal analysis, it was possible to clarify the meaning of the category of the aspect: the perfect form creates an image of the perfection of the event with a set, culmination and obligatory denouement, and the meanings of perfection, incompleteness, limitation, integrity, attributed to the perfect form, can sometimes express implicitly as additional meanings.

It was also possible to determine the main stages and logic of historical changes along the way of improving the language system in the depiction of a developing event: the opposition of a noun and a verb at the root level ‒ grammaticalization of the spatial characteristics of an event through the development of thematic affixes and opposition of a present and aorist ‒ a grammaticalization of the temporal characteristics of an event (opposition of verb forms according to the degree of duration of the action referred to as the nucleus of the depicted event and the growth of durative differences into aspectual). The principle of the ratio of the degrees of duration and aspect and it is difference of the 1^st and 2d type of conjugation (lines) and) in Russian is reflected in the table 3 (Melnikov, 1997, p. 136).