Type of perfective meaning and nominalization of verbs in Russian, Ukrainian and Polish

The article investigates some problems of the verbal perfective semantics typology. Regarding this issue, some theoretical aspects of verbal noun derivation are discussed. The influence of the type of limit on the productivity of delimitative verbs in relation to verbal nouns in Russian, Ukrainian and Polish is analysed. The meaning of the perfective aspect is not identical in all Slavic languages. While in East Slavic the idea of limit is more important, in West Slavic the semantic features of pointness, quantumness and totality of the action dominate. This feature corresponds well to the differences in amounts and functional scopes of verbal nouns in Slavic languages: the fact is that these amounts, as well as the verbal properties of nomina actionis, decrease significantly from West to East. The author's hypothesis is that the prohibition of nominalization for some verbs is caused not by the perfectivity of the verbal form as such, but by the type of limit expressed, namely resultative, one-act, or quantitative-temporal. The solid analysis of the productivity of certain verb semantic series in relation to nomina actionis in Russian, Ukrainian and Polish shows clear relationship between the particular type of limit expressed by verb and the ability of the latter to nominalization. In Russian, for instance, nouns may be easily derived from verbs with a resultative and one-act type of limit, but this is impossible in the case of verbs with a quantitative-temporal one. Despite the much larger number of action nouns in Ukrainian, the same semantic restrictions may be seen. The Polish verbal noun is known as a regular verb form which virtually has no restrictions for forming aspectual pairs. Nevertheless, the author has found a group of Polish verbs, the aspectual semantics of which systematically prevents nomi-nalization. Corresponding deverbatives may be found in dictionaries, but are not actually used in speech, which has been proved by a solid analysis of corpus data. It is reasonable to believe that one of the grounds of the amount of nomina actionis decreasing from West to East (Polish ^ Ukrainian ^ Russian) is that the quantitative-temporal limit of action increases in the semantic structure of perfective verbs in the same direction. The quantitative-temporal type of limit is also poorly compatible with the substantive form as such. The concept of time dominating in the semantics of quantitative-temporal limitedness is very likely to conflict with the categorical semantics of the noun.

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