1. Four Languages Verbs from the Bottom up
CLEAR (Cognitive Linguistics: Empirical Approaches to Russian)
UiT The Arctic University of Norway

2. Overview What is a grammatical profile? What we have done so far:
Modern Russian top-down
Old Church Slavonic bottom-up
Why are grammatical profiles worth doing?
aspect & aktionsart, modality, transitivity/causativity
pedagogical implications
What we would like to do:
Four languages bottom-up
Russian
Czech
North Saami
Norwegian

3. What is a grammatical profile?
Verbs have different forms:
eat M
eats 121 M
eating 514 M
eaten M
ate 258 M
Figures from google – this is NOT a scientific way to do grammatical profiles, but it gives us a rough approximation to illustrate
The grammatical
profile of eat

4. Grammatical profiles of Russian, top-down
Janda & Lyashevskaya 2011
6M datapoints, Russian National Corpus

6. Grammatical Profiles of Russian Verbs
Nonpast
Past
Infinitive
Imperative
Imperfective
1,330,016
915,374
482,860
75,717
Perfective
375,170
1,972,287
688,317
111,509
chi-squared =
df = 3
p-value < 2.2e-16
effect size
(Cramer’s V)
= 0.399
(medium-large)
Based on verbs with 100 or more attestations in RNC

7. Prefixation (dark) vs. suffixation (light):
Distribution of Russian verb forms according to subparadigm
Prefixation (dark) vs. suffixation (light):
Statistically significant, BUT effect sizes too small (0.076 & 0.037)

8. Distribution of Russian verbs according to subparadigm:
Imperfective verbs and their attraction to imperative
Over 200 outliers
2/19/20192/19/2019

9. Imperfective imperative “be doing X!”
Polite: guest knows what to expect: razdevajtes’ ‘take off your coat’, sadites’ ‘sit down’
Insistence: hearer is hesitant: stupajte ‘get going’, gljadite ‘look’, zabirajte ‘take’
Insistence: hearer has not behaved properly (connection with negation): provalivaj ‘get out of here’, končaj ‘stop’, ne perebivaj ‘don’t interrupt’
Polite requests: vyručajte ‘help’
Kind wishes: vyzdoravlivajte ‘get well’
Idiomatic: davajte posmotrim ‘let’s take a look’
Idiomatic/culturally anchored: proščaj(te) ‘farewell’, soedinjajtes’ ‘unite’ (slogan), zapevaj ‘sing’ (army)

10. Russian Grammatical Profiles: Findings
Perfective verbs behave differently than imperfective verbs
“Verb pairs” behave the same regardless of which type of morphology (prefixation vs. suffixation) is used to mark aspect
We can identify exactly the verbs that are most attracted to various TAM combinations.

11. OCS grammatical profiles, bottom-up
Eckhoff & Janda 2013
9,694  attestations from PROIEL corpus
Status of perfective/imperfective aspect in OCS is contested
Dostál 1954 suggests classification of perfective vs. imperfective verbs
Our analysis concurs with Dostál 96%

12. imperfective verbs
have negative
Factor 1 values
perfective verbs
have positive
Factor 1 values

13. Grammatical Profiles: Four languages, bottom-up
We could also look at:
Modality
Transitivity, causativity
Other categories relevant for verbs
Pedagogical applications
Morphological Aspect
Morphological Aktionsart
Russian +
Czech -
N. Saami
Norwegian