DiAsPol250 - The Development of the Polish Aspect System in the Last 250 Years against the Background of Neighbouring Languages

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Our project aims to create an up-to-date profile of Polish aspect and its evolution over the last 250 years, in contrast to both Russian and Czech. Inner-Slavic continua in hierarchies of functions and the interaction of aspect with other verbal categories and distinctions on clause and discourse level provide the background. German serves as an independent kind of gauge, as it lacks aspect, but requires choice of tense and must react to the same functional distinctions as aspect languages do on grammatical and discourse levels. Starting from recent findings on the areal differentiation of aspect use and patterns of aspect pairings in Slavic languages, we assume a model that aims at pinpointing correspondences between synchronic inner-Slavic differences and diachronic evolution in heterogeneous domains relevant to aspect choice. Polish is transitional between Slavic languages in the east and the southwest, its recent history thus serves as a very suitable test case for this model.As regards functions, we focus on hitherto neglected issues: certain subtypes of the non-actual present tense, subtler differences of iterativity, and aspect in the context of modal and propositional modifiers (or constructions). We also want to investigate present tense accom-plishment predicates in legal texts as regards their interpretation by specialists in law and by naïve speakers. As for patterns of morphological derivation, we will determine how inconsi-stencies in the formation of aspect pairs have been, and are, overcome by the elimination of so-calledc triples, biaspectual and aspectual tantum verbs. To these ends we will construct a Polish-German parallel corpus covering the last 250 years. The corpus will be tagged to suit the needs of Slavic aspectology, in particular our specific topics, but it will also be of use to other researchers in linguistics and related domains, and thus serve a long-term practical use. In addition, we will conduct surveys based on questionnaires.