40 лет Санкт-Петербургской типологической школе

house built.PF.PPP.SG.M in past year

«The house was built last year».

In spite of the form postroen «built», which one can consider resultative because of its derivational history, (16a) denotes a permanent state through the specification of a property attributed to the entity (iz kirpica «of brick»). The construction therefore enters into the adjectival paradigm as confirmed by the adverbials of duration test in (16b). To explain the grammaticality of (16b), following Knjazev [1988: 351] advances the argument that adverbials of duration are incompatible with resultatives denoting irreversible states, but that these adverbials may appear with resultatives «under special conditions» as for example in (16c) where the subject would be plural. Let us note however that the grammaticality of (16c) evidences the interesting problem of the interaction between quantification and aspect which deserves more study. The comparison between (16a) and (16d) shows that the occurrence of the temporal expression allows one to retrieve the event which is at the origin of the resultative state: (16b) is the expression of an actional perfect passive [Maslov 1988: 66].

As mentioned earlier on the subject of Polish, the «be» — passive may be constructed with an imperfective participle; if the verb has an imperfective derivative, two constructions are possible:

Bulgarian

(17a) Trevata e/bese okosena *(mnogo pati)

grass.the is/was mow.PF.PPP.SG.F (many times)

(ot studentite)

(by students.the)

«The grass was mowed» (by the students).

(17b) Trevata e/bese kosena (mnogo pati)

grass.the is/was mow.IMPF.PPP.SG.F (many times)

(ot studentite)

(by students.the)

«The grass has been mowed» (many times) (by the students).

(17c) Trevata e/bese okosjavana mnogo

grass.the is/was mow.IMPF.PPP.DERIVATE.SG.F many

pati/vsjaka godina (ot studentite)

times/every year (by students.the)

«The grass is/was mowed many times/every year (by the students)».

In (17a) the meaning is clealy that of a resultative state having its origin in a completed event. As opposed to (17a), in (17b) the resultative state has its origins in an interrupted event; the process is thereby highlighted and means «has been mowed (by someone)» or «has been mowed (by someone)»; Maslov terms this «actional passive present» and «actional passive perfect» respectively. However, according to the tense of the auxiliary and the discourse context, the resultative state may be related to past or future situations.

(18) Nisto za otbeljazvane, osven ednapodrobnost, kojato sasto ne e osobeno ljubopitna: sleden sam. Ne tvarde

follow.IMPF.PPP.SG.M am

nastojcivo i ne osobeno grubo, no sam sleden (B. Rajnov).

am follow.IMPF.PPP.SG.M

«Nothing to report except one detail which is not particularly strange: I'm being followed. Not really regularly, nor brutally, but I'm being followed».

(19) A xlabat bese pecen <…> po star whereas bread.the was cook.IMPF.PPP.SG.M according old balgarski obicaj

Bulgarian tradition

«Whereas the bread was baked <…> following some old Bulgarian tradition».

(20) Toj znaese, ce osemdeset dekaraniv <…> bjaxa

he knew that eighty acres fields were

kupuvani obsto, no slucajno v prodavatelnija

buy.IMPF.PPP.PL in.common but by.chance in of.sale

akt bjaxa pisani samo na imeto na Valcana.

act were write.IMPF.PPP.PL only at name.the of Valchana

«He knew that eighty acres of field <…> had been bought in common, but that, by pure chance, in the sale document, they had been registered under the sole name of Valchan».

With some merely interrupted processes, the construction becomes compatible with adverbs such as mnogo pati «many times» or cesto «often». The adverbial form is thus incidental to the event and leads to an iterative interpretation. In other words, in the iterative sense, the event is presented as an open class of events in which neither a first nor a last occurrence may be isolated and the resultative state refers to the general result of all these occurrences.

Going back to example (17c), the participle is derived from a secondary imperfective verbal base, and such forms demand an iterative context; the construction thereby denotes a resultative state which originates from an event presented as a closed class of events which has a first and a last occurrence, even though their number is not always specified.

Due to the verb prefix, each event included in the series is analysed as a completed process. The following two examples make apparent the opposition between this meaning (17a) and that of a resultative state (17b):

(21a) <…> ot dva i polovina veka knjazeskijat dom be

of two and half century of.prince.the house was

opozarjavan mnogo paati

burn.IMPF.PPP.SG.M several times

«<…> over two and a half centuries the princely residence has been set on fire several times».

(21b) <…> knjazeskijat dom be opozaren predi dva i

of.prince.the house was bum.PF.PPP.PL before two and

polovina veka *mnogo pati

half century several times

«<…> two and a half centuries ago the princely residence was set on fire».

The other Slavic languages have apparently not developped such a mechanism. Yu. Maslov [1988: 79] points out a few scarce examples such as the following in Polish which does not seem to belong to a paradigm as do those in Bulgarian:

(22) Wqgiel jest wydobywa-n-y

coal is mine.IMPF-PPP-SG.M

«Coal is (being) mined»

Descriptions of Serbo-Croatian show the first two variations pointed out for Bulgarian: (23a) and (24a) refer