Verbs with semantics of incomplete action in the Ukrainian and Russian languages: A corpus study

This article investigates a specific type of aspectual meaning by analyzing Ukrainian and Russian verbs with the prefix po-, which express actional incompleteness. These verbs form part of the lexicon that reflects the worldview of Slavic language speakers. The study is grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Slavic aspectoiogy, functional word formation, prefixoiogy, and research on linguistic worldviews. Previous stages of this research have identified both the shared structural and semantic features of these verbs in Russian and Ukrainian, as weii as their differences concerning the specific meanings of “attenuative” units and the productivity of prefixai modeis for forming the corresponding meanings. The current anaiysis focuses specificaiiy on verbs with the prefix po-. Aiongside prefixes iike pid-/pod-, pri-, nad-, and nedo-, po-is a productive marker of incompieteness semantics, interpreting an action as partial, of short duration, or intermittent. Characteristic of this prefix in Slavic languages are its polysemy, lack of spatial meaning, and semantic abstractness. At the present stage, the study examines the functional patterns of these attenuative verbs using data from the parallel Russian-Ukrainian corpus within the Russian National Corpus. The corpus data enabled a comparison of how these verbs function in both languages, identifying instances where Russian po- verbs are consistently translated by semantically equivalent Ukrainian units, as well as cases where the semantics of incompleteness are not rendered in translation - even when cognate verbs exist in Ukrainian-particularly for discontinuous and attenuative meanings. The analysis demonstrates that verbs expressing incompleteness are highly context-dependent. The context not only generates such units but also sustains them, specifying their meaning and resolving the prefix's inherent polysemy. Furthermore, an examination of subcorpora from fiction and official-business domains revealed that these verbs are prevalent in literary texts but absent in formal administrative contexts. A direction for further research is to determine the correlation, if any, between the use of an attenuative verb and the thematic, generic, or discursive orientation of the text in which it appears.

Keywords

Authors

References