Verbal Aspect in Russian and Polish Legal Texts

Abstract

The fact that habitual actions are much more often expressed by imperfective verbs in Russian than in Polish and in Polish much often than in Czech is usually explained by invoking temporal definiteness as the semantic prototype of the perfective aspect in the East-Slavic zone and totality as the semantic prototype of the perfective in the West Slavic zone. However, Polish legal texts and codices as well as proverbs are much often formed with imperfective verbs, whereas Russian codices and proverbs use perfective verbs in habitual-pair construction or exemplifying meaning (when Russian uses a verbal noun instead of personal verb forms the perfective aspect is expressed in a dependent participle form). These differences in the use of aspect require a re-analysis of prototype semantic features of the aspect in the West-Slavic, East-Slavic and transitional zones of the Slavic languages. Refs 8. Table 1.