hyper-verb documentation

The project Hyperspacing the Verb

Aspect

The database contains the following information on the grammatical aspect of the annotated verbs:

• imperfectivity vs. perfectivity;
• aspectual pairs – for each verb, its eventual grammatical pair is specified, as well as the grammatical means through which one member of the pair is derived from the other, i.e. the grammatical relation between them (see Table X).

A verb is marked as imperfective if it can be used in the present tense to answer the question of what is happening right now:

Q: Šta se trenutno dešava?
A: Jovan otvara / *otvori prozor.

A verb is considered perfective if it can be used within the construction „Samo da + the present tense“:

Samo da kupim novine, pa ću doći.

If a verb passes both imperfectivity and perfectivity tests, it is annotated as biaspectual, e.g. registrovati se (’to register’):

Imperfective: Upravo se registrujem na sajt.
Perfective: Samo da se registrujem na sajt, pa dolazim.

Two verbs are treated as aspectual counterparts (i.e. they constitute an aspectual pair) if they differ only with respect to the aspectual value. As pairs like treptati – trepnuti indicate, the derivation of the aspectual counterpart may include more than one step.

Table X. Aspectual pairs

Columns A verb gets a plus in a column, if the respective question receives a positive answer, where the questions are the following: