The Old Slavonic present participles of perfective verbs with anteriority meaning. Sources of aspect mismatch

Elena Svedentsova
St Petersburg University

Abstract: The paper shows the extremely rare uses of the Old Slavonic present participles of perfective verbs and biaspectual verbs in perfective utterances on the time slice of the X–XI centuries. The combination of incompatible grammemes of the present tense and the perfective aspect within one form is resolved either by dominance of the tense category with respect to the aspect, or vice versa. The Old Slavonic language seems to provide both of these possibilities. The variety of the preserved perfective participle forms gives us a different angle to reassess the Slavic Aspect origination process. The available Byzantine Greek correspondences and the precisely defined frequency of participial uses in Slavonic texts allow a peek into the specificity of the present participles formation from perfective verbs in the Slavonic language. Focusing on the meaning of anteriority makes it possible to contribute to a typology of taxis constructions.

Keywords: Old Slavonic, Byzantine Greek, the present participle, perfect verb, biaspectual verb, (Slavic) aspect, anteriority, taxis constructions, typology

For citation: Svedentsova E. The Old Slavonic present participles of perfective verbs with anteriority meaning. Sources of aspect mismatch. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2023. Vol. 6, iss. 1. Pp. 90–111. (In Rus.) doi:10.37632/PI.2023.74.79.004