Aspectual Architecture of the Slavic Verb and Its Nominal Analogies

It has been argued that there are analogies between the nominal domain and the verbal domain in natural languages. Most approaches dealing with these analogies in Slavic languages investigate them from the semantic and aspectual points of view. In contrast to them, this article focuses on morphosyntactic parallels. It investigates all five aspectual markers of verbal predicates: prefixes, the secondary imperfective, the semelfactive morpheme, the iterative -a and the habitual suffix. The analysis follows the Distributed Morphology framework. This article addresses the question of which morphosyntactic correspondences these aspectual markers have in the nominal domain. It is argued that the iterative secondary imperfective is a parallel of the nominal number projection and that the habitual morpheme in North Slavic languages is the counterpart of the nominal determiner. Verbal prefixes are analogous to nominal classifiers, and in addition, lexical prefixes parallel the nominal complement, and superlexical prefixes correspond to adjectival modifiers of the nominal domain. The internal iterative -a, as a spell-out of the verbal categorizing head, is analogous to the categorizing head of nouns. Thus, it is argued that Slavic also has event-internal and event-external pluractional markers. The semelfactive morpheme parallels the singulative (diminutive) marker of the nominal domain, and we argue that these markers adjoin to the root before the categorizing head. This argues against the standard claim that semelfactives are derived from iteratives (multiplicatives).