Formal Description of Slavic Languages: The Ninth Conference
Uwe Junghanns, Dorothée Fehrmann, Denisa Lenertová, Hagen Pitsch · Peter Lang D eBooks · 2013
The present paper aims at a formal analysis of Russian verb stems, and, specifically, at the integration of the forms of the lexeme BYT' 'be' (copula and/or auxiliary) into the resulting verb system.It is argued that Russian verbs usually exhibit two stem variants that do not differ with respect to morphosyntactic features, argument structure and semantics.Inflectional affixes add specific morphosyntactic features to a verb form, however they do not contribute to its meaning.Semantic information is assumed to be introduced by semantic operators that are stored in the mental lexicon and projected in syntax as functional heads.Agreement between these operators and fully inflected verb forms results in interpretable structures.BYT'-forms derived from the stem variants /by/ and /bud/ behave almost exactly as other Russian verb forms.It turns out that the zero form of BYT' as well as the marginal forms esť and suť diverge from the general pattern insofar as they are fossilized, suppletive forms.They differ from the 'regular' forms, which are derived from /by/ or /bud/, in several important respects.Also, the present analysis offers a plausible way of explaining the 'future forms' derived from /bud/ without claiming these forms to be perfective aspect, and without having to resort to a morphosyntactic feature [±Fut(ure)].* I would like to express my gratitude for helpful discussion to Dorothee Fehrmann, Ljudmila Geist, Uwe Junghanns, Joost Kremers, Denisa Lenertová, Gerhild Zybatow, and many others.Thanks are also due to two anonymous reviewers whose detailed comments have been truly helpful. 1 Jakobson (1948) offers an analysis known as the one-stem system.He proposes only one single full stem for each 'regular' Rus verb, from which all inflected forms are derived by means of an extensive rule component (see Chvany 1990).Note that Jakobson himself emphasizes that his model serves primarily didactic purposes.