Interaction between Aspect and Voice in Russian
Youri A. Poupynin
Institute of Linguistic Studies, St.Petersburg
The Russian linguistics is gradually concentrated on the analysis of the Russian verb categories as a certain system. The study of the tense and the aspect in their connection already became traditional. The present work aims especially to research the Russian aspect and voice in the mutual connections. The book contains three parts. The interrelation of the aspect and the voice in the grammatical system of Russian (i.e. in the verb paradigm) is to be considered in the first part "Towards the problem of connections of grammatical categories: aspect and voice". The first part includes the following chapters: "Aspect and voice in the hierarchy of Russian verbal categories", "Symmetry and asymmetry in the paradigmatic intersection of aspect and voice", "Connections between the terminativity and the transitivity", "A field approach in the study of connections of grammatical categories".
The second and the third parts are devoted to the functional-semantic interaction of the aspect and the voice. The following approach to prove the functional-semantic interaction of grammatical categories is proposed in the book: one of the two given categories has to be treated as a source of semantic backgrounds whereas the second category has to be treated as a source of the semantic functions. The fact of the interaction would be established if the semantic functions of the second category change (are restricted, specified, expanded etc.) going through a certain semantic background represented of the first category. The high syntactic significance of the voice makes it to be considered as a source of the semantic backgrounds (active and passive) and, accordingly, the aspect has to be considered as a source of the semantic functions.
The second part deals with the imperfective functions on the passive and active background. Because in many Russian aspectological studies the semantic functions of the imperfective and the perfective are mainly illuminated on the material of active forms, the special attention is given to functioning of passive forms, while examples with the active forms are attracted for the contrastive analysis. The second part includes chapters devoted to specific features of the particular meanings of the imperfective aspect in the passive voice: meaning of the process, iterative meaning, qualitative meaning etc.
The third part includes chapters contained the study of the specific features of the particulars meanings of the perfective aspect in the passive voice: meaning of the completed event, meaning of the "vivid exemplification", summative meaning. Restriction or expansion of different aspectual functions in passive constructions (in comparison with active constructions) are especially noted and discussed.
ISBN 9783895860560. LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 02. 170pp. 1999.
