This is an old revision of the document!
Prefixes
In what follows we describe how prefixation is annotated in the database
The general guideline that we followed in determining if a verb is prefixed or not is ‘if it can be taken to be a prefix, then it is a prefix’ where the starting point were existing lists of prefixes in BCS and Slovenian (reference).
To this end, the first step was to determine if a verb that seems to be prefixed has an unprefixed pair, e.g. Slovenian prebrati ‘to finish reading’ has the pair brati ‘to read’, the BCS pročitati ‘to finish reading’ has the pair čitati ‘to read’.
If the seemingly prefixed verb does not have an unprefixed pair, we have checked if a verb with the same root, but a different prefix exists. If it does, the verb was taken to be prefixed and annotated as such. Examples of this kind are, for example, verbs with the root četi:za-četi ‘start’, po-četi ‘to do’, na-četi ‘start’, pri-četi ‘start’, za-četi ‘start’ (even though četi does not exist).
In general, the annotation shows if the verb is prefixed and, if it is, which prefixes are present on the verb (see below). The column Prefixed_verb shows if a verb has prefix or prefixes (1) or not (0).
| Language | Example | Prefixed_verb | Gloss & Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| BCS/Slo | pisati | 0 | ‘to write.ipfv’; the verb has no prefix. |
| Slo/BCS | napisati | 1 | ‘to write.pfv’ |
| Slo/BCS | načeti | 1 | ‘to start.pfv’, četi is not attested |
| BCS/Slo | početi | 1 | ‘to do.pfv’; četi is not attested |
| BCS | započeti | 1 | ‘to start.pfv’; četi is not attested |
This information is relevant for the column Simplex_verb too - in this colomn either a prefix or any type of an affix, it is marked with a 0.
Prefixes are marked in 3 additional columns (common name Prefixes, columns 1, 2 and 3). In these columns we show both which prefixes the verb has and the position of each individual prefix with respect to the root, where position 1 marks the position closest to the root (hence the order of prefixes in the columns is reversed compared to their linear order in the verb itself). If there has no prefix in the position, we annotate this with 0. If the verb has one prefix, we give the prefix in column 1. More examples are given below. Verbs with no annotated prefixes have zeros in all three columns. Note that this annotation only marks the linear position of the prefix and that we are making no claims about the syntactic position of each prefix (whether it is lexical, intermediate, super-lexical etc.).
| Language | Example | 1 | 2 | 3 | Gloss & Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BHS | čitati | 0 | 0 | 0 | ‘to read.ipfv’; the verb has no prefix |
| BHS | pročitati | pro | 0 | 0 | ‘to read.pfv’; the verb has 1 prefix |
| BHS | započeti | po | za | 0 | ‘to start.pfv’; the verb has 2 prefixes |
| BHS | sporazumeti | raz | po | s | ‘to understand.pfv’; the verb has 3 prefixes |
| Slo | brati | 0 | 0 | 0 | ‘to read.ipfv’; the verb has no prefix |
| Slo | prebrati | pre | 0 | 0 | ‘to read.pfv’; the verb has 1 prefix |
| Slo | pridobiti | do | pri | 0 | ‘to get.pfv’; the verb has 2 prefixes |
| Slo | sporazumeti | raz | po | s | ‘to understand.pfv’; the verb has 3 prefixes |