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Verbal Aspect in the Czech and Russian Imperative
Abstract The opposing perfective (PV) and imperfective (IPV) aspects are not used uniformly across Slavic languages. One of the areas of variation is the imperative, where especially Russian is known to express special pragmatic meanings (politeness and rudeness) through the IPV (Padučeva 22010, Benacchio 2010), a possibility which other languages like Czech possibly lack. Using corpus data, this paper attempts to check Benacchio’s claims that Czech makes almost no use of the pragmatic IPV imperative. One study compares the relative frequencies of PV and IPV imperatives for a chosen number of aspect pairs in Czech, Polish and Russian using the Aranea webcorpora; the other study uses the parallel corpus InterCorp (v9) to compare the frequency of Czech IPV imperatives corresponding to Russian PV and vice versa. Both studies show the IPV imperative to be more widespread in Russian than in Czech (and Polish), lending support to Benacchio’s claims.
Keywords Verbal aspect, imperative, politeness, parallel corpus, Slavic
