Aspect and prefixation in Old Church

Slavonic*

Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

UiT The Arctic University of Norway / University of Oslo

In this article we focus on one grammaticalization path to perfective markers, that

of the so-called ‘bounder perfectives’ (Bybee & Dahl 1989). Systems with these
kinds of perfective markers – often called ‘Slavic-style aspect’ – are particularly
elaborated in the Slavic languages. To examine why this is the case, we study the
long-disputed question of the semantic relationship between the inflectional
aspectual system inherited from PIE and the emerging affixation-based verb
pair system in expressing aspect in Old Church Slavonic (OCS), using parallel
Greek and OCS data from the PROIEL corpus. Previous researchers have made
extremely conflicting claims about this relationship, some seeing the inflectional
system as the main exponent of aspect, others seeing the affixation system as the
main exponent of aspect. Our statistical study of the data shows rather that the
OCS system attests an interesting language stage where there are two partially
overlapping exponents of aspect. By firmly establishing the facts of the synchronic
OCS system, we can look both backwards and forwards. We argue that Slavic
‘bounder perfectives’ owe their advanced development to their coexistence with
the old inflectional aspect system. We also argue that the well-known interactions
between the two aspectual systems in Bulgarian, which still retains both, are
probably a later development.

Keywords:  aspect; Old Church Slavonic; grammaticalization; Aktionsart;

corpus linguistics

1.  Introduction

One of the known grammaticalization paths to perfective markers is that of

the s­ o-called ‘bounder perfectives’. This type of perfective marker is found in a

*  Preliminary versions of this research were presented at seminars in Cambridge, Freiburg,

Gothenburg, Oslo, Oxford and Zürich. We thank the audiences there for valuable discussion
and feedback. We are also grateful to Diachronica editor Joe Salmons and his associate editors,
as well as the referees, for advice on making this paper better and more readable.

Diachronica 32:2 (2015), –. doi 10.1075/dia.32.2.02eck

issn 0176–4225 / e-issn 1569–9714 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

­ umber of languages: according to Bybee & Dahl (1989: 86), it is found in Latvian

n
and Lithuanian (Baltic, IE), Hungarian (Finno-Ugric), Georgian (Kartvelian),
Margi (Chadic) and some Micronesian languages such as Kusaeian and Mokilese,
in addition to Slavic. Nonetheless it is often referred to as ‘Slavic-style’ aspect since
the Slavic languages have uniquely elaborated systems based on such markers. At
the same time, the Slavic languages have become the paradigmatic aspect lan-
guages, not least because of seminal work by Jakobson (1932) and Comrie (1976).
The situation is therefore somewhat paradoxical in that the Slavic aspect systems
are at the same time both unique and paradigmatic. For this reason, a historical
study of the origin of the systems should be of interest to all researchers working
on the diachronic evolution of aspect markers.
In this article we look at the earliest attested stage of Slavic, Old Church S­ lavonic
(OCS), in order to examine why the Slavic languages came to have such pervasive
bounder perfective systems. In order to do this, we return to the long-disputed ques-
tion of the semantic relationship between the inflectional aspectual system inherited
from PIE and the emerging affixation-based verb pair system in expressing aspect
in OCS. Previous researchers have made extremely conflicting claims about this
relationship, some seeing the inflectional system as the main exponent of aspect,
others seeing the affixation system as the main exponent of aspect. We therefore find
it necessary to firmly establish the facts as attested in the earliest OCS texts using
parallel Greek and OCS data from the PROIEL/TOROT treebanks, making it pos-
sible to look both backwards and forwards in time. Our statistical study of the data
shows that the OCS system attests an interesting language stage with two partially
overlapping exponents of aspect. We argue that Slavic bounder perfectives owe their
advanced development to their coexistence with the old inflectional aspect system.
We also argue that the well-known interactions between the two aspectual systems
in Bulgarian, which still retains both, are probably a later development.
The article is structured as follows: §2 situates the article theoretically, dis-
cusses previous approaches and presents the data set. §3 gives a statistical exami-
nation of the OCS and Greek parallel data and concludes that OCS has dual
exponency of aspect. §4 gives a qualitative analysis of the relationship between the
two aspectual systems, showing that aspect mismatches between the two systems
are not reliably attested in the earliest OCS texts. §5 gives a diachronic interpreta-
tion of the data. §6 is the conclusion.

2.  Background

Research on grammaticalization has brought to the fore important recurring pat-

terns in the evolution of grammatical markers. Thanks to the pioneering s­ tudies
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

of Bybee & Dahl (1989) and Bybee et al. (1994), we know, for example, that ante-
riors (perfects) tend to develop into past tenses or perfective aspect markers, that
progressives tend to develop into general imperfects and that verbs expressing
agent-oriented modality such as desire and obligation tend to develop into future
markers.
Such generalizations are typically cast in terms of the life-span of individual
‘grams’. In their conclusion, Bybee & Dahl (1989: 97) state programmatically:
“A ­better understanding of a gram ‘perfective’ is not as a member of a supercategory
of aspect, but as an instantiation of a range on a path of development, comparable
to other perfectives from similar sources and at similar stages of development.”
Subsequent research has confirmed the fruitfulness of this approach. Nevertheless,
it is a commonplace of diachronic linguistics since the structuralists that a change
can only be fully understood in the context of the linguistic system where it takes
place. For example, whether an anterior develops into a past or a perfective depends
on whether the language already has an imperfective. Another instance are the
­so-called ‘perfectives from zero’ (Bybee et al. 1994: 90–91; the term itself reveals
that we are pushing the limits of a purely gram-based understanding of grammat-
ical evolution), i.e. instances where an unmarked verb form takes on perfective
meaning as the consequence of the development of an imperfective in the language.
In this paper, we focus on the third path to perfectives sketched by Bybee &
Dahl (1989), beyond anteriors and ‘zeroes’, the so-called ‘bounder perfectives’. We
will demonstrate that such bounder perfectives are also significantly influenced
in their development by the surrounding linguistic system, at least in the case of
early Slavic. Bounder perfectives arise from adverbs such as up, down, over and
through, which pair with verbs to create a sense of completion. Scattered examples
are found in many languages such as, e.g., in English eat up, and some languages
make more systematic use of them. But “perfectivization by bounders usually has a
marginal grammatical status in the languages where it can be found. In spite of the
parallels that can be found in other languages, Slavic languages seem to have gone
further than other languages towards generalizing the applicability of bounder
perfectivization, and making it an essential part of the aspect system” (Bybee &
Dahl 1989: 86). The modern Russian system is illustrated in Table 1.1 Apart from

.  The glossing in this paper uses the Leipzig abbreviations. To save space, present participles
are glossed as prsp, past participles as pstp, aorist participles as aorp and perfect participles
as prfp, and voice information is omitted unless voice is of importance to the example. We
use the abbreviation ptc for particle and imperf for imperfect. We do not gloss Greek articles
unless they modify non-inflecting nouns. To avoid glossing verbs as ‘perfective’ or ‘imperfec-
tive’, we have instead opted for a glossing that also gives information about affixation. In both
Greek and OCS examples, we provide verbal prefixes in the glosses, and for the OCS examples
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

the bounders (here na- “on” and s- “with”, but many others are found), suffixation
plays a crucial role: though bounders sometimes add only aspectual meaning,
they may also change the lexical meaning of the verb, in which case suffixation is
needed to create a corresponding imperfective verb. The result is a very systematic
use of affixation to express aspect, more so than is possible in Latvian, Lithuanian,
Hungarian and Georgian, which do not form secondary imperfectives.
Why did the Slavic languages go further than the others in systematizing
bounder perfectives? In this context, it becomes relevant to note that the Slavic
bounder perfectives did not develop in a vacuum. Slavic inherited from Indo-
European an inflectional opposition between an imperfect (past imperfective)
and an aorist (past perfective). OCS in fact shows apparent evidence of both the
old inflectional and the new bounder-based expression of aspect. Table 2 shows
the situation in OCS, with asterisks marking unattested forms for these particular
verbs: there is a derivational system strongly reminiscent of the patterns found
in modern Slavic aspect pairs, but also an apparently aspect-driven, inflectional
split in the past tense, with both an aorist and an imperfect. The present tense and
the infinitive, on the other hand, have no such split.

Table 1.  Affixation in Russian

Gloss Imperfective Perfective

“write” pisa-t’ na-pisa-t’

“copy” s-pis-yva-t’ s-pisa-t’

Table 2.  Affixation and inflection in OCS

Stem Present Aorist Imperfect Infinitive

tvor-i- tvor-i-tъ tvor-i tvor-jaaše tvor-i-ti

sъ-tvor-i- sъ-tvor-i-tъ sъ-tvor-i *sъ-tvor-jaaše sъ-tvor-i-ti
sъ-tvar-ja- sъ-tvar-jaj-etъ *sъ-tvar-ja sъ-tvar-jaaše sъ-tvar-ja-ti

Table 2 raises several questions: What is the relationship between the emerg-
ing affixation-based expression of aspect using bounder perfectives (the rows of
the table), and the old, inflectional system (the columns of the table, in particular
the aorist and the imperfect)? Did the new system oust the old one as it expanded,
or did the two systems coexist for a period as multiple exponents of aspect? In this

we also provide verbal suffixes, if any. Prefixes and suffixes are italicized and separated from
the glossing of the lexical meaning by a full stop.
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

paper, we argue for the latter view. This provides an explanation for the gaps in the
paradigm, and also suggests a reason why the systematization of bounder perfec-
tives went further in Slavic than elsewhere: the bounder perfective emerged within
a system where there was already an obligatory, inflectional expression of aspect
and coexisted with it for a while in a multiple exponence system, therefore natu-
rally taking on the systemic role of the other exponent.

2.1  The category of aspect

Aspectology is a notorious terminological and conceptual quagmire. We believe it
is essential for a fruitful study that we make use of a precise conceptual apparatus,
which we make explicit in this section.
In line with most previous work, we assume a basic distinction between
Aktionsart (aka lexical aspect) and aspect (aka viewpoint aspect). Following Klein
(1994, 1995), we take the imperfective viewpoint to focus a time interval that is a
subset of the run time of the eventuality described, whereas the perfective view-
point focuses a time interval that contains the whole run time of the eventuality
described. That is, a perfective sentence such as (1) makes a claim about a time
interval which properly includes the whole event of John building a house. As a
result, the sentence entails that John finished the house.
(1) John built a house.

(2), by contrast, only makes a claim about a subinterval of the event of John build-
ing a house: the speaker only commits to the claim that John was engaged in
house-building for a certain period.
(2) John was building a house.

This sentence does not entail that John finished the house, although in many con-
texts that will be a natural implicature. Still, (2) is compatible with an explicit claim
that the event was not completed, as in (3), giving rise to the so-called ‘imperfec-
tive paradox’.2
(3) John was building a house when the lightning killed him.

Aktionsart, being a classification of eventuality descriptions (i.e. predicates), is of

a different nature than aspect. Predicates can be categorized according to several
parameters, but for our purposes, the important distinction is that between telic

.  A ‘paradox’ because a naive formalization of the semantics of (3) leads to the conclusion
that the event of John building a house both existed and did not exist.
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

and atelic predicates, i.e. whether the event is described as being directed towards
an endpoint or not.3
For obvious reasons, it is more natural to focus the entire time span of the event
if the event is described as having an endpoint. Hence there is a preference for per-
fective aspect with telic predicates and imperfective aspect with atelic ones, which
has been confirmed by numerous acquisition studies ever since ­Bronckart & Sinclair
(1973); see also Stoll (2005) for Russian. However, it is perfectly possible to describe
an event as directed towards an endpoint, while leaving it open whether the end-
point is actually reached, as in (2), or explicitly denying that it was reached, as in (3).
We also find the opposite kind of ‘mismatch’ whereby an atelic event descrip-
tion occurs in the perfective aspect. In some cases, this gives us just the interpre-
tation that the eventuality lasted for some time and then ceased (the delimitative
or, as we will call it here, the complexive reading, as in (4)). In other cases, the
description is reinterpreted as describing the beginning of an eventuality (ingres-
sive reading, as in (5)).
(4) John ran for two hours.
(5) Suddenly he knew.

The fact that many languages allow mismatches of this kind makes it necessary to
draw a conceptual distinction between telicity and aspect. However, it should be
noted that languages vary in the extent to which they allow such mismatches. In
many languages aspect comes with selectional restrictions on telicity. This is true
in particular of most modern Slavic languages, to which we now turn.

2.2  Telicity and aspect in Slavic

Dahl (1985: 84–85) suggests that ‘Slavic-style aspect’ (essentially aspectual systems
with ‘bounder perfectives’) is typologically unusual in three respects:

1. It is relatively independent of tense and time reference.

2. It is derivational in character.
3. It is closely connected with telicity: perfectives can only have telic readings.

The two first features find an obvious explanation in the historical origin of such
aspect systems where the aspect markers originate from bounders. We now focus

.  Alternatively, one can conceive of telicity in terms of non-divisiveness and non-­
cumulativity, as Łazorczyk (2010) does, following Borer (2005); see §2.3.2. For our purposes,
this does not matter, since it is precisely the presence of an endpoint that makes a predicate
non-divisive and non-cumulative.
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

on the third feature. To see what is going on, let us consider questions 13 and 14
from Dahl’s questionnaire Dahl (1985: 74):
(6) Context: What did your brother do after dinner yesterday?
Sentence: He WRITE letters
Russian: On pisalimpf pis’ma
(7) Context: What did your brother do after dinner yesterday?
Sentence: He WRITE a letter
Russian: On na-pisalpfv pis’mo

Following Dahl (1985: 75), the reason the perfective cannot be used in (6) is
that in Russian, the perfective requires a bounded event, whereas ‘writing’ is an
unbounded activity as long as we have not delimited the object in any way. That
is, the Russian perfective cannot have the complexive reading we introduced
above.
The lack of a complexive reading for the perfective is almost certainly a Slavic
innovation. (8) shows how the perfective past of a Greek stative verb can have both
a complexive and an ingressive reading.
(8) ebasileuse
be.king.aor.3sg
“He was king.” or “He became king.”

The Greek pattern recurs in the other IE languages that preserve traces of the
old aorist/imperfect distinction too. Complexive readings of the aorist are found
in Vedic (Dahl 2010: 289–293), Latin (Ernout & Thomas 1959: 224, Hofmann &
­Szantyr 1965: 318, Menge et al. 2000: 187) and Armenian (Daniel Kölligan, p.c.).
These are the languages that best preserve the inherited aspectual system based
on an opposition between the aorist and the imperfect in the past tense. We
refer the reader to Hewson & Bubenik (1997) for a full overview of aspect in
Indo-European.
Late Common Slavic is similarly reconstructed as having an aorist/­imperfective
distinction in the past only, as shown in Table 3.4

Table 3.  The late common Slavic aspect system illustrated by staviti- “place”
present aorist imperfect
stavlju stavixъ staväxъ

.  Table 3 is taken from Andersen (2006: 235), but ignores the periphrastic tenses, which are
not relevant for our purposes. The forms are given in East Slavic (pre-Russian), but illustrate
the category inventory of Common Slavic.
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

Morphological innovations apart, this is precisely the system that we find in

Vedic, Greek and Armenian, which did have a complexive reading of the aorist.
It is tempting to conclude that this reading was lost exactly during the shift from
the inflectional system to the derivational one. As we will see, that is just what our
analysis suggests.

2.3  Earlier research

The aspectual system in OCS has been the focus of much attention, but there is
still little agreement on the status of the affixation/verb pair system and its inter-
relationship with inflectional aspect.

2.3.1  Did OCS have an aspect pair system?

There is consensus in the literature that the modern Slavic aspect pair system must
have evolved from a system with copious prefixation marking of various Aktions­
arten (see, e.g. the seminal study in Maslov 2004). However, scholars disagree
about the pace of this development, and very different claims have been made
about the synchronic system in OCS. Several scholars claim that OCS had a full-
fledged verb pair system, notably Dostál (1954),5 even more strongly stated by van
Schooneveld (1951). Other scholars, such as Borodič (1953) and Bermel (1997),
claim that the aspect pair system was not properly established until well into the
Old Russian period, and hence that the system was not established yet in OCS. On
a related note, Łazorczyk (2010) sees the affixation system in OCS as an expression
of Aktionsart, not aspect. Several scholars hold an intermediate position: A
­ mse-De
Jong (1974) argues that the aspect pair system was established, but that there was
also a group of neutral verbs that did not participate in it (see Růžička 1957 for a
similar view for Old Russian, and Forsyth 1972 for both Old Russian and OCS).

2.3.2  Verb pairs vs. inflection

If the verb pair system was well established in OCS, one must ask how that system
interacts with the inflectional opposition between the aorist and the imperfect.
Perhaps the majority of scholars assume such a well-established pair verb
system, and claim that it is the primary exponent of aspect. They therefore need
to define the meaning of the imperfect and aorist (and the participles) in such
a way that the definitions differ from the definition of imperfective and perfec-
tive aspect. Many of these authors have difficulties in spelling this out: Dostál
(1954: 15–16) defines the perfective aspect as denoting an action viewed as
a complete (integrated) concept, and the aorist as denoting a progression or

.  Eckhoff and Janda (2014) largely confirm Dostál’s classification statistically.
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

sequence of completed events. As observed by Bermel (1997: 90), these two con-

cepts are hard to distinguish. Similarly, Amse-De Jong (1974) defines both the
opposition between ­perfective and imperfective (as expressed by verb pairs) and
the opposition between the aorist and the imperfect in terms of the relationship
between event time and narrated time. Other authors are able to posit a discern-
ible semantic difference between the two systems: van Schooneveld (1951: 96–97)
argues that verb pairs express (non-)completion of the process, whereas the
aorist/­imperfect opposition denotes (non-)simultaneity with some other occur-
rence. Meillet (1934: 226–227) holds the aorist to be a neutral past tense, while
the imperfect denotes duration in the past.
Forsyth (1972: 504–505) is one of the few to argue that Slavic in its first attes-
tation was at a transitional stage where affixed verbs had strong associations with
the inflectional aspect system: simple prefixed verbs with the aorist and derived
prefixed verbs with the imperfect. With simplex (unprefixed and non-derived)
verbs, on the other hand, both the aorist and the imperfect occur freely. Hence,
the incipient verb pair system and the inflectional system must to some extent be
expressing the same thing.

2.3.3  What forms exist?

The various views discussed in §2.3.2 imply different expectations as to which of the
forms from Table 2 actually occur in the texts. If we adopt van Schooneveld (1951)’s
strong distinction between the prefixation system and the inflectional one, we would
expect all the cells to be filled. If, on the other hand, we follow Forsyth (1972), we
expect that in verbs with explicit affixal encoding of aspect, inflectional aspect can-
not contradict this coding. In other words, the gaps in Table 2 are not due to chance.
Again, there is a middle ground. For example, Amse-De Jong argues that it is
true that imperfective verbs may not occur in the aorist, but that perfective verbs
do marginally occur in the imperfect, while Łazorczyk (2010: 115) argues that
imperfective aorists are possible, but perfective imperfects are not – in the few
attested cases, the imperfect morphology must be viewed as “fake” (not semanti-
cally interpreted).
What forms exist or not is an empirical question, which holds the key to how
to interpret the early Slavic system. Negative data must of course be interpreted
with care in a language stage with limited data. But we argue that Forsyth (1972)’s
view – not at all a majority view in current scholarship – is essentially correct:
The verb pair system and the inflectional aspect are both exponents of viewpoint
aspect. There is still a number of verbs which do not participate in the verb pair
system, but for those that do, mismatches between affixation and inflection are
impossible in the earliest attested OCS system. We will corroborate the analysis
statistically, as well as offer the theoretical underpinnings of such an analysis.
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

2.4  Data and methodology

2.4.1  Text choice
Our study is based on data from the two only extant tetraevangelion translations6
of the Gospels in the OCS canon: the Codex Marianus and the Codex Zographen-
sis. These two texts contain 23,538 verb tokens (excluding the lemma (ne-)by-ti
“be” due to its high frequency and deviant behaviour), enough for a proper statisti-
cal study.7 We focus on these two texts for two reasons.
First, we are interested in the earliest possible attestation of the Slavic aspec-
tual system, and the Codex Marianus and the Codex Zographensis must be
viewed as two of the very oldest texts in the OCS canon (Lunt 2001: 7). They are
clearly more archaic than the largest non-Biblical OCS manuscript, the Codex
Suprasliensis, which according to Lunt (2001: 9) represents a “language in every
particular younger than that of the other texts [in the OCS canon]”. The Gospel
manuscripts are, as translations, also much more polished and accomplished than
the Suprasliensis translations, with few distorted passages and less Greek interfer-
ence. Thus, while the findings of this paper naturally only hold for the language of
the ­Marianus and the Zographensis, we believe that these two texts hold a special
place as early, high-quality attestations of OCS.
Second, this is a study that relies heavily on analysis of correspondence pat-
terns between Greek and Slavic, and the Gospels are the only OCS texts that
can can be fairly reliably compared with Greek parallels.8 This is not the case for
the largest OCS manuscript, the Codex Suprasliensis, which is translated from the
Greek, but where many of the extant Greek source texts are fairly distant from the
Suprasliensis and some of them are missing altogether.9

.  There are also two lectionary translations, the Codex Assemanianus and the Savvina
kniga, both probably younger than the two tetraevangelia, and the latter certainly linguisti-
cally more innovative (Lunt 2001: 8). We will not use these translations.
.  The dataset is presented online as a .csv file in supplementary material A. All supple-
mentary materials are publicly archived at the Tromsø Repository for Language and Linguis-
tics (opendata.uit.no) with the permanent handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10037.1/10158. The
reader is strongly encouraged to consult the online materials.
.  ‘Parallel’ must be taken with some caution here, since we do not have the Greek text that
served as the original of the Slavic version. Instead, we use Von Tischendorf (1869–1872), an
approximation of the Greek Gospel texts (written around 100 CE), which has some discrep-
ancies with the 9th-century OCS translations. This may affect the interpretation of particular
examples, but the overall effect is statistically negligible. Von Tischendorf (1869–1872) is cited
as GNT in Greek examples (which are all taken from this edition).
.  In Zaimov & Capaldo (1982), the editors have attempted to remedy this problem by pro-
ducing a composite Greek text, taking one Greek manuscript as the point of departure and
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

One might object that since the Marianus and the Zographensis are close tex-
tual variants of the same text, it is unnecessary to include both. However, we see
that they differ in interesting ways in the choice of verb lemma and form. There
are 10,750 verb correspondences between the Marianus and the Zographensis
(i.e. verbs that are aligned with the same Greek word) in the data set. In 362 cases,
the two texts use different lemmata. In 200 of these cases the two lemmata share
the same stem, but differ in affixation patterns. This means that a simplex verb
in one text will quite frequently correspond to a prefixed verb in the other text
(na-pьs-a ti vs. pьs-a ti “write”), or a prefixed verb in one text may correspond
to a prefixed and suffix-derived verb in the other (u-gotov-i-ti, u-gotov-a-ti “pre-
pare”). We also see that the inflectional forms do not always match: 223 of the
verb ­correspondences have different tense/mood forms. For instance, an aorist
indicative in one text may correspond to a past participle or a present indicative
form in the other. In addition, both texts contain text passages that are missing
in the other text.
Both texts are available with comprehensive annotation from the PROIEL/
TOROT treebanks.10 Importantly, every Slavic word that corresponds to a word
in the Greek text of von Tischendorf (1869–1872) has a pointer to that word. All
three texts are lemmatized and have detailed manual morphological annotation,
and the Greek New Testament and the Marianus also have full syntactic annota-
tion. Moreover, in all three texts all verbs are annotated for derivational morphol-
ogy at the lemma level: Greek verbs are annotated for prefixation and base verb
form, and OCS verbs are annotated for prefixation, suffixation and bare stem. For
a fuller description of the PROIEL corpus, we refer readers to Haug & Jøhndal
(2008) and Haug et al. (2009).11

molding this text to the translation by removing passages that are missing in the Suprasliensis
and exchanging other passages with better-corresponding passages from other Greek manu-
scripts (Capaldo 1985). While these Greek texts make for a good reading aid, they are not
suitable for a parallel study such as ours.
.  TOROT (The Tromsø OCS and Old Russian Treebank, https://nestor.uit.no) is an expan-
sion of the Slavic part of the PROIEL corpus (Pragmatic Resources in Old Indo-European
Languages, http://foni.uio.no:3000). The Codex Marianus (edition: Jagić 1883) was fully an-
notated in PROIEL, but is also included in TOROT along with the Greek Gospels. TOROT
also contains a full version of the Codex Zographensis (edition: Jagić 1954). The data were all
drawn from TOROT in December 2014.
.  By extension, these papers also describe the TOROT corpus, which retains the structure
and annotation policies of the PROIEL corpus.
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

2.4.2  Greek and Slavic correspondences

The study is based on an analysis of patterns of correspondence between Greek and
Slavic, as well as intra-Slavic patterns. In this we essentially follow the approach of
Meillet (1902), although we exploit the possibilities of modern corpora to improve
on the analysis of correspondence patterns. We believe that the use of the parallel
Greek text gives a unique window on the semantics of Slavic verbal forms. There
are two main reasons for this.
First, we know that the translators of the Slavic version, Cyril and ­Methodius,
were native speakers of Greek and probably bilingual (see e.g. Schenker
1995: 28–29), which means that they would be sensitive to fine aspectual distinc-
tions in the Greek original,12 on the one hand, and on the other hand had (near-)
native knowledge of a South Slavic dialect and its complex verbal system.
Second, although both Greek and Slavic have an aorist/imperfect distinc-
tion and although the aorist morphology of the two languages is etymologically
connected, there are no synchronic similarities between the two languages that
could lead a translator to use a Slavic aorist in translating a Greek one for for-
mal reasons. Any perceived similarity would have had to be based on semantic
considerations.
On the other hand, the principles behind the system of verbal prefixation
are formally quite similar in Greek and Slavic. Some prefixes were probably
seen as correspondences based on their basic spatial meaning, leading to Slavic
calques.13 Nevertheless the sheer difference in numbers shows that the Slavic
is not simply following the Greek. Among all the verb forms in our data set
(with byti “be” o­ mitted), 11,679 (49.6%) are prefixed and 11,859 (50.4%) are not.
Among the Greek verbs in our data set, 3,547 (27.7%) are prefixed and 9,241
(72.3%) are not.

3.  Quantitative analysis

In this section we use the parallel data set to establish the synchronic facts of the
early OCS aspect system, using as few assumptions about the system as possible.
These facts are subsequently used as a firm platform for qualitative and diachronic
analysis in the following sections.

.  The Greek aorist/imperfect distinction remained relatively constant from the 1st to the
9th century (and in fact up to the modern period).
.  See Molnár (1985) for a full study of such calques, cf. also Schuyt (1990: 291–292).
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

3.1  Does verb inflection express aspect?

As we saw in §2.3, it is not uncommon to claim that verb inflection does not express
viewpoint aspect in OCS. However, comparison with the corresponding form in
the Greek aligned text strongly suggests that the distinction between the aorist and
the imperfect in OCS is functionally similar to that in Greek – even though the
forms are synchronically very different, and in the case of the imperfect, innova-
tions. Table 4 shows this for the past tense system. In a data set limited to aorists
and imperfects in both languages, we see that over 98% of the Greek a­ orists are
translated as aorists both in the Marianus and the Zographensis, and that over 88%
of Greek imperfects are translated as imperfects in both sources.

Table 4.  Slavic translations of Greek aorists and imperfects, Marianus: n = 3639,
Zographensis: n = 3316
Marianus Zographensis

aorist % imperfect % aorist % imperfect %

aorist 2887 98.6 42 1.4 2604 98.2 47 1.8

imperfect 79 11.1 631 88.9 73 11.0 592 89.0

These numbers leave no doubt that the Slavic aorist/imperfect distinction is

roughly similar to the one we find in Greek. Although there are some mismatches,
(9) and (10) are typical cases.
(9) a. čьto ubo stvori zъlo
what.n.acc.sg ptc sъ.do.i.aor.3sg evil.n.acc.sg
“What evil has he done?”
(Zographensis, Mark 15.14)
b. ti gar epoiēsen kakon
what.n.acc.sg ptc do.aor.3sg bad.n.acc.sg
“What evil has he done?”
(GNT, Mark 15.14)
(10) a. idǫštju že emu postilaaxǫ
go.prsp.m.sg.dat ptc he.m.dat.sg po.spread.aj.imperf.3pl
rizy svoję po pǫti
cloaks.acc.pl refl.poss.f.acc.pl on road.loc.sg
“As he was going along, they were spreading their cloaks on the road.”
(Zographensis, Luke 19.36)
b. poreuomenou de autou hupestrōnnuon ta
go.prsp.m.sg.gen ptc he.m.gen.sg hupo.spread.imperf.3pl the
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

himatia autōn en tēi hodōi

cloaks.acc.pl they.gen.pl on the road.dat.sg
“As he was going along, they were spreading their cloaks on the road.”
(GNT, Luke 19.36)

We see that Greek aorists are very rarely translated as imperfects, but this does not
mean that they are automatically translated into aorists. This becomes particu-
larly clear when we look at the interrelationship between Greek aorists and perfect
forms on the one hand and OCS aorists and l-forms14 on the other hand: Greek
aorists are sometimes translated as l-forms, whereas Greek perfects are predomi-
nantly translated as OCS aorists. Thus, the Greek and OCS aorists clearly do not
overlap completely. We also see from Table 4 that the Greek imperfect appears to
have a wider domain than the OCS one.
An equally strong tendency is seen in the participle system. Greek participles
express aspect, not relative tense (unlike participles in many other languages). In
many cases, this amounts to the same: the ongoingness denoted by the present
(imperfective) participle translates into temporal overlap with the event denoted
by the finite verb, and the completion denoted by the aorist (perfective) participle
translates into anteriority relative to the main event. This gives rise to the ‘school
rule’ that a present participle should be translated into English as “X-ing”, and an
aorist participle to English “having X-ed”. But this is not always the case, cf. (11).
(11) a. hēmarton paradous haima
sin.aor.1sg para.betray.aorp.m.nom.sg blood.n.acc.sg
athōion
innocent.n.acc.sg
“I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.”
(GNT, Matthew 27.4)
b. sъgrěšixъ prědavъ krъvъ
sъ.sin.i.aor.1sg prě.betray.pstp.m.nom.sg blood.acc.sg
ne povinъnǫ
not guilty.f.acc.sg
“I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.”
(Marianus, Matthew 27.4)

Here the event of betrayal is presented as completed, and hence the aorist is used,
even if the event is simultaneous (and to some extent identical) with the sinning

.  Also known as ‘resultative participles’, they almost exclusively occur with byti “be” as an
auxiliary in several periphrastic past tense and mood forms.
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

event. For a deeper analysis of the aspectual nature of participles in Greek, see
Bary & Haug (2011).
Statistical analysis corroborates the view that Greek and Slavic participles
function more or less in the same way, as shown in Table 5. In a dataset limited to
OCS past and present participles15 translating Greek participles, we see that nearly
99% of the Greek aorist participles are translated as OCS past participles in both
sources, and that around 98% of the Greek present participles are translated as
OCS present participles, again in both sources. Again, this might make us worry
that the translator’s choice of form is automatic, but Table 6 shows that OCS parti-
ciples render a number of finite forms as well (often finite passive verbs). In these
examples, we also see a fairly strong tendency to follow the Greek aspect: over 94%
of the Greek finite aorists in this set are rendered by OCS past participles in both
sources. The preference for a present participle translation of Greek imperfects
also seems clear at 70–80%.

Table 5.  OCS participles translating Greek participles, Marianus: n = 2561,

Zographensis: n = 2286
Marianus Zographensis

past % present % past % present %

aor 1070 98.8 13 1.2 938 98.7 12 1.3

fut 0 0.0 2 100.0 0 0.0 1 100.0
pres 23 1.8 1225 98.2 22 1.9 1109 98.1
perf 178 78.1 50 21.9 157 77.0 47 23.0

We therefore conclude that there is no real difference between the aorist/

imperfect distinction in finite forms and the so-called present/past distinction
in participles in this regard, neither in the Marianus nor the Zographensis. They
both follow the Greek closely, which indicates that they both express the category
of aspect. Because of this, we merge the two data sets from both sources in the
following analysis, yielding a data set of 13,707 tokens including all OCS aorists,
imperfects and present/past participles, which we use throughout §3.2. For sim-
plicity, we refer to OCS present participles and imperfects as ‘imperfects’, and to
past participles and aorists as ‘aorists’ throughout, unless the finiteness distinction
is crucial.

.  We include both active and passive OCS participles, since both show the same strong
correspondence with Greek aspect.
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

Table 6.  OCS participles translating Greek non-participles, Marianus: n = 310,

Zographensis: n = 305
Marianus Zographensis

past % present % past % present %

aor 104 94.5 6 5.5 105 94.6 6 5.4

fut 29 96.7 1 3.3 27 100.0 0 0.0
impf 2 16.7 10 83.3 4 26.7 11 73.3
plpf 3 100 0 0.0 3 100.0 0 0.0
pres 15 34.1 29 65.9 14 33.3 28 66.7
perf 46 100.0 0 0.0 36 100.0 0 0.0

Table 7.  Predicting OCS inflectional aspect from Greek tense

OCS aor OCS impf

Greek impf, plupf, pres 7.5% 27.8%

Greek aor, fut, perf 62.7% 2.1%

In participles and past tense verbs, we can predict the OCS choice of inflec-
tional aspect with 90.5% (= 62.7 + 27.8) accuracy using Greek tense as the only
predictor, as shown in Table 7. We therefore conclude that OCS has an aspectual
split in the past tense system and in the participle system, which is largely, but
not entirely, functionally equivalent to the Greek split. Among the differences, we
particularly note that the Greek imperfect has a slightly wider distribution than
the Slavic one. Many of the cases where Greek has an imperfect and OCS an aorist
are either found with speech verbs, where the use of aspect is variable and deviant
in both languages, or reflect unsystematic differences in interpretation. In addi-
tion, however, there is a coherent group of examples where Greek imperfects are
rendered by apparently ingressive aorists in the OCS. Apart from this, we find that
the aorist and imperfect have the same usages as in Greek.

3.2  Affixation and aspect

Given that there is an inflectional exponent of aspect in the past tense and in
the participle system, namely the aorist/imperfect distinction, it is natural to ask
what role affixation plays in the aspectual system. What do the prefixes and suf-
fixes mean? And how does affixation relate to inflectional aspect? We will now
examine these questions based on the past-tense and participle data set we estab-
lished in §3.1.
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

Even a simple contingency table of the affixation patterns shows us imme-

diately that OCS affixation to some extent correlates with inflectional aspect
(Table 8).16

Table 8.  OCS affixation on participles and past tense verbs

affix aorist imperfect

none 2156 437

prefix 2669 13
suffix 1643 2639
both 3154 996

Strikingly, prefixed, unsuffixed verbs hardly ever occur in the imperfect. We

find only thirteen examples. There are six examples of sъ-mě-ti “dare”, which is
probably prefixed historically, but was in all likelihood not perceived as such by
the time of OCS. There are also six occurrences of i-ti and gręs-ti “go, walk” com-
bined with prefixes that neither denote goal nor source, but rather path (e.g. mimo-
“through, by”) or location (e.g. prěd-, in prěd-i-ti “walk in the front, lead the way”
(Marianus, Luke 18.39)). In addition, there is a single occurrence of po-zna-ti “rec-
ognize”, which is in all likelihood an error (Zographensis, Luke 24.16, see §4.2).
Thus, the meaning of prefixation is apparently incompatible with imperfective
aspect. The Greek text has no such restriction, and there are 198 imperfects from
prefixed verbs in the Greek data, cf. (12).

(12) kai katebē lailaps anemou eis tēn

and kata.go.aor.3sg storm.f.sg.nom wind.m.sg.gen into the
limnēn kai suneplērounto kai ekinduneuon
lake.f.sg.acc and sun.fill.imperf.3pl and be.in.danger.imperf.3pl
“And a windstorm came down on the lake, and they were filling up with
water and were in danger.”
(GNT, Luke 8.23)

.  We have made no attempt to distinguish between suffixes that are seemingly involved
in aspectual verb derivation (imperfectivization, perfectivization) and suffixes that are not.
Hence, verbs counted as having no suffix in Table 8 are only those that add the infinitive suffix
directly to the stem, such as i-ti “go”, nes-ti “carry” and similar verbs (classes 7 and 9 in Lunt
2001: 85).
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

Now recall from §2.1 that we view Aktionsart as a classification of eventuality

descriptions. The predicate sum-plēroō (“fill up”) clearly describes an event that
is directed towards a goal, the complete filling of the boat. Hence, the eventuality
description is telic. The fact that we get imperfective aspect (and a progressive in
the English “were filling up”) does not alter the telicity; but it restricts the asser-
tion to a subinterval of the event, thereby leaving open whether the endpoint – the
complete filling of the boat – was in fact reached.
(12) shows that the combination of a telic event description with the imper-
fective aspect can be expressed in Greek by the use of a prefixed verb in the
imperfect. Such examples are translated into OCS by using a prefixed verb clearly
derived from another prefixed verb by suffixation, as seen in (13), or – in dispro-
portionately many cases,17 as shown in Table 9 – by dropping the prefix.
(13) a. i ta umiraaše
and that.f.nom.sg u.die.aj.imperf.3sg
“(For he had an only daughter, about twelve years old,) and she
was dying.”
(Zographensis, Luke 8.42).
b. kai autē apethnēisken
and she.nom.sg apo.die.imperf.3sg
“(For he had an only daughter, about twelve years old,) and she
was dying.”
(GNT, Luke 8.42)

Table 9.  OCS renditions of Greek prefixed verbs, n = 4039

aorist imperfect

no prefix 8.2% 41.9%

prefix 91.8% 58.1%

In other words, prefixation (without an accompanying suffix) is incompatible

with imperfectivity. Telicity itself cannot account for this incompatibility, since
there is no such restriction in Greek. The most likely conclusion, then, is that pre-
fixation has already taken on the meaning of perfective aspect.
The role of the suffixes is less clear. As we saw in Table 8, suffixation increases
the frequency of the imperfect. We also see that prefixation and suffixation in

.  p-value < 0.0001, Fisher’s exact test, two-tailed.

 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

Table 10.  Token frequency of suffixes on participles and past-tense verbs

suffix all verbs unprefixed verbs

aorist imperfect aorist imperfect

– 4825 450 2156 437

ě 563 555 354 537
ja 305 392 196 261
ěj 104 14 0 9
jaj 412 245 6 43
a 1185 1068 644 1008
aj 98 251 15 56
a/aj 72 93 14 15
(V)va 2 63 0 16
i 1731 826 265 585
nǫ 197 0 42 0
ova 128 128 107 109

combination is common with the imperfect. When we look at the distribution of

­suffixes by inflectional aspect in Table 10, however, we find that no suffix18 appears
to be exclusively associated with the imperfect, not even, e.g., -aj- (14). If we look
at unprefixed verbs only, we find no aorist occurrences with the suffixes -ěj- and
-va-, but the numbers are very low. Note that the aorist occurrences of unprefixed
-aj- and -jaj- verbs are due to as many as eight lemmata.19
(14) a. sego bo otcъ znamena bъ
this.m.gen.sg for father.nom.sg mark.aj.aor.3sg god.nom.sg
“For on Him the Father, God, has set His seal.”
(Marianus, John 6.27)

.  In our segmentation of OCS verbs we have taken a maximally synchronic approach. The
suffixes are given as they appear in the infinitive, but for verbs with -j- in the present stem we
have added this -j- to the representation of the suffix. Note that we have collapsed verbs that
have -ja- in the infinitive with verbs that have palatalized consonant + -a- in the infinitive,
even though the latter have a suffix that usually originates in -ě(j)-. Accordingly, we arrive at a
verb classification that is very close to that of Lunt (2001: 85), but which collapses his classes
2b and 3. In Table 10, -(V)va- collapses -ava-, -va-, -ěva- and -java-. This row includes only
-va- verbs for the unprefixed verbs.
.  děl-a-ti “do”, znamen-a-ti “mark”, pisk-a-ti “play the flute”, rabot-a-ti “be enslaved, serve”,
ryd-a-ti “wail”, konьč-a-ti “end”, prǫž-a-ti sę “convulse”, svir-a-ti “play the flute”.
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

b. touton gar ho patēr esphragisen ho theos

this.m.acc.sg for the father.nom.sg seal.aor.3sg the god.nom.sg
“For on Him the Father, God, has set His seal.”
(GNT, John 6.27)

The -nǫ- suffix is not attested with the imperfect at all in our data set, and is clearly
a case apart.20

40
Impf. (Gk. impf.)
Impf. (Gk. aor.)
Aor. (Gk. impf.)
Aor. (Gk. aor.)
30
Freq

20

10

0
vъzьrěti zьrěti nazirati nazьrěti ozirati uzьrěti prizьrěti prozьrěti sъzirati

Figure 1.  OCS verbs formed from the OCS stem zьr- “see”

In sum, suffixation increases the frequency of imperfective aspect, but this is

not because some suffixes require the imperfective. Rather, the suffixes are used
to generate a variety of verbal formations from each stem, and these formations
associate with a single aspect. In other words, the association with imperfective is
lexical. This is most striking when we look at Figure 1: every verb formation from
the root zьr- has specialized either with the perfective or the ­imperfective aspect.

.  Nesset (2012: 293) finds four attestations of the present participle and four of the imper-
fect in his exhaustive data set of unprefixed -nǫ- verbs in the OCS canon; in the data set there
were also eight such attestations of prefixed -nǫ- verbs (Tore Nesset, p.c.). Hence, the suffix is
not entirely incompatible with the imperfect in a wider OCS context.
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

Observe that this is independent of Greek aspect; the verb u-zьr-ě-ti “see” occurs
in the OCS aorist even when it translates a Greek imperfect. The pattern repeats
itself with other verbal roots.21
Another way to look at the same material is to start from the Greek and
look at which OCS verbs are used to translate them and how those verbs are
distributed in aspect. Figure 2 shows the translations of the Greek (prefixed) verb
para-didōmi “betray”. We clearly see that this verb is translated by an OCS verb
pair – a prefixed verb which never occurs in the imperfect, and a prefixed and
derived verb which never occurs in the aorist. This pattern repeats itself with
many verbs.22

40

30
Freq

20

10

0
prědati prědajati

Pres. (Gk. impf.) Other (Gk. impf.)

Pres. (Gk. aor.) Other (Gk. aor.)
Impf. (Gk. impf.) Aor. (Gk. impf.)
Impf. (Gk. aor.) Aor. (Gk. aor.)

Figure 2.  OCS translations of Greek paradidōmi “betray”

.  Similar figures for all the 100 most frequent OCS verbal stems are given online in supple-
mentary material B. http://hdl.handle.net/10037.1/10158
.  Figures detailing the distribution of aspect in all Slavic verbs translating Greek verbs that
occur both in the aorist and the imperfect indicative are found in supplementary material C.
http://hdl.handle.net/10037.1/10158
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

3.3  Categorizing verbs

Given the strong correlation between inflectional aspect and affixation patterns in
participles and past tense verbs, we will quite simply categorize verbs according to
their aspectual preferences:
–pfv the verb only occurs in the aorist
–pfv(<4) the verb only occurs in the aorist, but fewer than 4 times
–ipfv the verb only occurs in the imperfect
–ipfv(<4) the verb only occurs in the imperfect, but fewer than 4 times
~pfv neutral verb, significantly more aorists23
~ipfv neutral verb, significantly more imperfects23
~neut neutral verb, no aspect dominates
Given this classification, we see the distribution patterns shown in Table 11.24
Observe that fully 760 verbal lexemes only occur in a single aspect, whereas only
74 occur in both the aorist and the imperfective, and only 38 have no clear aspec-
tual preference. There are several clear tendencies in the material: Prefixed verbs
with no suffix are almost always perfective. Imperfective verbs, on the other hand,
are generally suffixed. Unprefixed verbs (both with and without suffixes) are over-
represented among the ‘neutral’ verbs. This supports the conclusion reached above,
that affixation can also express aspect. In particular, it makes it likely that prefixed
verbs express perfective aspect, that suffixed verbs express imperfective aspect and
that unprefixed verbs do not express aspect by their stem form, although they
could of course bear inflectional aspect.

Table 11.  Affixation patterns of perfective, imperfective and neutral verbs, past tense and
participle set
Verb type Token freq Lemma freq No affix Prefix Suffix Both

-pfv 5356 262 5 92 18 147

-pfv(<4) 382 205 4 54 23 124
-ipfv 1480 133 9 0 56 68
-ipfv(<4) 296 160 10 2 57 91

~pfv 3121 14 5 1 5 3
~ipfv 2433 22 3 0 14 5
~neut 639 38 7 2 18 11

.  Significance level p = 0.05, binomial test for both ~pfv and ~ipfv.
.  The classification of all OCS lemmata is found in supplementary material D. http://hdl.
handle.net/10037.1/10158
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

We will now go on to corroborate this conclusion with other material, by look-

ing at categories where Slavic does not express aspect inflectionally, whereas Greek
does. In particular we will look at infinitives (§3.3.1) and subjunctives (§3.3.2). If
affixation is just another exponent of the category of aspect, it should correlate
directly with the Greek aspect in these cases, just like inflectional aspect does in
the cases where it is available.

3.3.1  Infinitives
The Greek infinitive is inflected for aspect, but the OCS infinitive is uninflected.
If our categorization is right, we expect Greek aorist infinitives to be translated by
OCS perfective verbs and Greek imperfective (present) infinitives to be translated
by OCS imperfective verbs, as in (15).
(15) a. vlastь imatъ snъ ččsky na
power.nom.sg have.prs.3sg son.nom.sg of-man.m.nom.sg on
zemi otъpuštati grěxy
earth.loc.sg otъ.forgive.aj.inf sin.acc.pl
“(But that you may know that) the Son of Man has authority on earth
to forgive sins.”
(Zographensis, Luke 5.24)
b. ho huios tou anthrōpou exousian ekhei
the son.nom.sg the man.gen.sg power.acc.sg have.prs.3sg
epi tēs gēs aphienai hamartias
on the earth.gen.sg apo.forgive.prs.inf sin.acc.pl
“(But that you may know that) the Son of Man has authority on earth
to forgive sins.”
(GNT, Luke 5.24)
We find that this is largely the case, as shown in Figure 3.25
In other words, it seems that in the infinitives, which cannot express aspect
through inflection in Slavic, the derivational morphology assumes the role as the
sole morphological exponent of aspect.26

.  Figure 3 excludes Greek infinitives headed by the verb mellō “to be about to” (often used
as a future auxiliary). This verb always requires a present infinitive, whereas the Slavic transla-
tions invariably use a perfective infinitive, in line with the future meaning. We assume that
this is a difference in aspect selection of auxiliary-like verbs in the two languages rather than
a semantic difference.
.  The difference is statistically significant; crossing the Greek source aspect with the
­assigned aspect of non-vacillating verbs only, the p-value is less than 0.0001 (Fisher’s exact
test, two-tailed).
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

500
Aorist
Present

400

300
Freq

200

100

0
-ipfv -ipfv(<4) -pfv -pfv(<4) -unkn. ~ipfv ~neut ~pfv
Verb type

Figure 3.  Infinitives, n = 1317

3.3.2  Subjunctives
The Greek subjunctive is inflected for aspect. OCS, however, has no subjunctive as
such, only a compound construction with the l-participle and a subjunctive-like
form of byti “be”, often referred to as the conditional. This construction is quite
rare, and only 27 of the 1684 occurrences in the subjunctive set are translated by
the OCS conditional. The great majority of Greek subjunctives are translated by
OCS present indicatives (1382), but since the Greek aorist subjunctive substitutes
for the imperative under negation, and since OCS imperatives also regularly trans-
late Greek hortative subjunctives, a sizeable share of the subjunctives are trans-
lated by OCS imperatives (132 occurrences). In addition, a fair number of Greek
subjunctives are translated by infinitives (89 occurrences).
The great majority of subjunctives, then, are translated by OCS forms that
do not have an inflectional exponent of aspect. Again we expect the affixational
exponent to ‘step in’ so that Greek aorist subjunctives should be translated
by OCS perfective verbs, as in (16), and present subjunctives by imperfective
verbs.
(16) a. molišę pilata. da prěbijǫtъ
ask.i.aor.3pl Pilate.gen.sg that prě.break.prs.3pl
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

golěni ixъ
knee.f.acc.du he.gen.pl
“They asked Pilate that their legs might be broken.”
(Zographensis, John 19.31)
b. ērōtēsan ton Peilaton hina kateagōsin
ask.aor.3pl the Pilate.acc.sg that kata.break.aor.sbjv.3pl
autōn ta skelē
he.gen.pl the leg.nom.pl
“They asked Pilate that their legs might be broken.”
(GNT, John 19.31)

We see in Figure 4 that this is largely the case. Greek shows a general preference for
aorist subjunctives, but present subjunctives have a much greater chance of being
translated by imperfective verbs.27
Again, we conclude that the derivational morphology acts as sole exponent of
aspect in these cases.

3.4  Synchronic conclusion: The OCS aspect system

In this section we have established several synchronic facts about the early OCS
aspect system. We saw in §3.1 that the old inflectional system, i.e. the opposition
illustrated in Table 3, is still alive and well in OCS: the aorist/imperfect distinction
expresses aspect, just like in Greek. The distinction is found in the OCS past tense
and participle system, but not elsewhere, e.g., in the infinitive and imperative, as
in Greek.
Then we saw in §3.2 that the affixation system, i.e. the OCS counterpart to
the modern Russian system, also expresses aspect. As shown in §3.3, this is
particularly evident in forms that lack the aorist/imperfect distinction in OCS,
such as infinitives and subjunctives. Thus, OCS already has a fairly pervasive
bounder perfective system: in fact, it is already more extended than other reported
bounder-based systems, because there is already clear evidence for secondary
imperfectivization, which does not exist in Baltic, Hungarian or Georgian.
The upshot is that the OCS system has – at least in parts of the paradigm –
a  dual exponence of aspect, one inflectional and one derivational. This is con-
firmed by the close correlation between inflection and derivation. Despite claims
by many authors (e.g. van Schooneveld 1951 and Dostál 1954) that any verb may
occur in any inflectional form, there are remarkably few verbs (74 of 834 lemmata)

.  The difference is statistically significant; crossing the Greek source aspect with the
­assigned aspect of non-vacillating verbs only, the p-value is less than 0.0001 (Fisher’s exact
test, two-tailed).
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

800
Aorist
Present

600
Freq

400

200

0
-ipfv -ipfv(<4) -pfv -pfv(<4) -unkn. ~ipfv ~neut ~pfv
Verb type

Figure 4.  OCS translations of Greek subjunctives

in our data set that occur both in the aorist and the imperfect. As can easily be seen
online in supplementary materials B and C, http://hdl.handle.net/10037.1/10158
most verbs have a clear preference for either the one or the other. In particular, we
see that affixation creates derivations that robustly select for a single aspect.
Nevertheless, we must allow that the correlation is not perfect. There are verbs
in the lower half of Table 11 that occur in both aspects. Our account clearly makes
the prediction that these are verbs where the derivational morphology, if any, is
not explicitly aspectual, i.e. that overtly marked perfective verbs will not occur
in the imperfect and that overtly marked imperfective verbs will not occur in the
aorist. In the next section, we verify this.

4.  Inflection and derivation in OCS aspect marking

4.1  Aspectual pairs and overt marking

As we saw in §3.2, whether a verb is overtly marked for aspect cannot be judged
by the affixation pattern of that verb seen in isolation. Rather, since the verbs form
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

aspectual partnerships, what counts as overt marking must always be seen in rela-
tion to the form of the partner verb. Therefore we need a clear way of identifying
aspectual pairs. We have chosen to do so by grouping OCS verbs by the Greek
verbs they translate, as discussed towards the end of §3.2 and visualized online in
supplementary material C http://hdl.handle.net/10037.1/10158 (see Figure 2 for
an example). We were able to identify pairs of the following five types.28

1. a prefixed determinate motion verb partnered by a prefixed indeterminate

motion verb (pri-nes-ti, pri-nos-i-ti “bring”)
2. a prefixed verb partnered by a derived prefixed and suffixed partner (o-stav-i-
ti, o-stavl-ja-ti “leave”)29
3. a prefixed verb partnered by an unprefixed verb (na-uč-i-ti, uč-i-ti “teach”)
4. an unprefixed verb partnered by an unprefixed derived (suffixed) verb (pust-
i-ti, pušt-a-ti “let go”)
5. an unprefixed verb partnered by another unprefixed verb with a different stem
(reš-ti, glagol-a-ti “speak”)

Due to the the complexities of the interactions between determinacy and affixa-
tion with motion verbs, we will not discuss group 1 further in this article, though
online supplementary material C http://hdl.handle.net/10037.1/10158 shows that
they follow the general pattern. We found only a single possible example of type 5,
namely the relationship between reš-ti “speak” and glagol-a-ti, but both ‘partners’
are aspectually unstable according to our classification. In pairs of type 2, we con-
sider both partners to be overtly marked for aspect. In pairs of type 3, only the pre-
fixed verb is overtly marked for aspect. In pairs of type 4, only the suffix-derived
partner is overtly marked for aspect. The other partner in both types of pairs often
comes out as aspectually neutral in our classification.

4.2  No imperfects from prefixed perfective verbs

The visualisations in online supplement C http://hdl.handle.net/10037.1/10158
reveal a very strong trend: prefixed verbs in type 2 and 3 pair formations do not occur
in the imperfect or as present participles, even when the Greek source verb does.
In this respect these verbs behave very differently from unprefixed (and underived)
verbs. Based on close examination of the data we will go as far as claiming that there

.  For a full list of pairs, see online supplementary material E http://hdl.handle.
net/10037.1/10158. We limited ourselves to the 203 Greek verb lemmata in our dataset that
occur in both aspects, which makes us miss a few low-frequency pair formations. These po-
tential pairs are nonetheless taken into account in the following sections.
.  The suffixed partners sometimes also undergo stem changes, typically vowel lengthening.
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

are no convincing attestations of overtly marked perfective verbs occurring in the

imperfect or as present participles, neither in the Marianus nor the Zographensis.
This is a somewhat controversial claim, since the literature regularly quotes a
small number of indisputable OCS prefixed perfective imperfects from the Codex
Suprasliensis, such as (17) and (18).30 Several of the examples are difficult to inter-
pret or come from corrupted passages,31 and different authors propose different
readings according to their individual hypotheses on OCS aspect.
(17) proklinaaše smokьvinicǫ i isъxnějaše
pro.curse.aj.imperf.3sg fig-tree.acc.sg and iz.wither.nǫ.imperf.3sg
Amse-De Jong: “(If) he cursed the fig tree, then it was bound to wither.”

Lazorczyk: “[If] he cursed the fig tree, then it would wither.”
(Suprasliensis 476.24, no Greek parallel)
(18) a. ne vьsegda li jegda načьněěxomъ sę brati.
not always ptc when na.begin.nǫ.imperf.1pl refl take.inf
glagolaaxomъ psalmosa sego
say.a.imperf.1pl psalm.gen.sg this.m.gen.sg
Amse-De Jong: “Did we not always say this psalm whenever we had to
begin the fight?”
(Suprasliensis 73.9)
b. Oukhi pantote, hotan ērkhometha polemein,
not always when begin.imperf.1pl fight.prs.inf
elegomen ton psalmon touton
say.imperf.1sg the psalm.acc.sg this.m.acc.sg
(Zaimov & Capaldo 1982: 165)

Galton (1976: 180) quotes (18), and takes it to express that an event was repeated
and realized each time, as is the typical use of such forms in modern Bulgarian
(e.g. Scatton 1993: 213). Note that both Łazorczyk (2010) and Amse-De Jong
(1974) suggest a narrower sphere of usage for the perfective imperfect than G
­ alton
(1976) does. Łazorczyk (2010: 108–118), who argues that verb inflection is the
exponent of viewpoint aspect in OCS, and that telic verbs may not combine with
the imperfect, resorts to claiming that the imperfect expresses neither viewpoint

.  Both the Marianus, the Zographensis and other OCS texts contain ambiguous examples
such as iscěljaaše “healed”, where we cannot really tell whether this is an imperfect form of
an explicitly perfective verb (iscělěti) or its explicitly imperfective derived partner (iscěljati).
However, as long as unambiguous examples are so hard to come by, we should be in no hurry
to accept these examples as perfective imperfects.
.  E.g., ostaněaxo (Suprasliensis 413.18).
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

aspect nor tense in these examples, but is restricted to non-referential contexts,

such as subjunctive and habitual contexts. Amse-De Jong (1974: 12, 40–41), on
the other hand, claims that the “perfective imperfects” express predictions, where
the narrated time span also includes a “Marked Period” (i.e. “a period greater than
the Full Event Period which is nonetheless characterized by the event”) before the
actual event time. Thus, the event time is identical with the narrated time, but not
with the Marked Period. Perfective imperfects in her interpretation are similar
in meaning to perfective presents; they denote events that are completed after a
certain point in time. All in all, the examples are too few to provide a clear under-
standing of the semantics of these forms.
Nonetheless, in our Marianus and Zographensis material, only three examples
could seriously be considered overtly marked perfective imperfect attestations.32
First, there is a single unambiguous imperfect occurrence of the verb vъ(z)-zъv-
a-ti “call” in the Zographensis (19). The verb has no other imperfect or present
participle occurrences in the data set, and is partnered by the verb vъ(z)-zyv-a-ti.
In the same passage, the Marianus has the unprefixed and underived verb zъv-a-ti
“call” in the imperfect. The example does not seem to have telic-iterative semantics
and does not occur in a non-referential or prediction context.

(19) a. i vъzъvaaxǫ slěpьca

and vъz.call.a.imperf.3pl blind-man.gen.sg
“So they called to the blind man.”
(Zographensis, Mark 10.49)
b. kai phōnousin ton tuphlon
and call.prs.3pl the blind.m.acc.sg
“So they called to the blind man.”
(GNT, Mark 10.49)

Second, the Zographensis has a single imperfect occurrence of po-zna-ti “know,

recognize” (20). Note that the imperfect form occurs in an embedded da clause,
where it is not expected; in fact, there are no occurrences of da clauses with verbs
in the imperfect in the syntactically annotated parts of the PROIEL/TOROT tree-
banks (Marianus and Suprasliensis). The expected form is the present indicative,
typically of an overtly perfective verb, which is what the Marianus has in the same
passage. It should also be noted that the Zographensis imperfect occurs after a
string of other imperfects, which may have influenced the choice of form. Thus
this is in all probability an error.

.  This discussion is based on careful examination of prefixed verbs in the ~pfv, ~neut and
-ipfv(<4) categories.
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

(20) a. oči že eju drьžaašete sę.

eye.nom.du ptc he.gen.du hold.a.imperf.3du refl
da ego ne poznaašete
that he.gen.sg not po.know.imperf.3du
“(Jesus himself approached and began traveling with them.) But their
eyes were prevented from recognizing Him.”
(Zographensis, Luke 24.16)
b. hoi de ophthalmoi autōn ekratounto
the ptc eye.nom.pl he.gen.pl hold.imperf.pass.3pl
tou mē epignōnai auton
the.n.gen.sg not epi.know.aor.inf he.acc.sg
“(Jesus himself approached and began traveling with them.) But their
eyes were prevented from recognizing Him.”
(GNT, Luke 24.16)
The third and semantically most interesting example is (21). This is the only
imperfect attestation of the verb ras-trьz-a-ti “tear apart” in the data set, but it has
a handful of aorist occurrences as well, and (21) has a clear telic-iterative reading:
the possessed man was repeatedly chained and repeatedly succeeded in breaking
the chains. The Marianus has the past active participle in the same passage.
(21) a. i raztrъzaaše ǫzy gonimъ
and raz.tear.a.imperf.3sg chain.acc.pl drive.i.prsp.pass.m.nom.sg
byvaaše běsomъ
be.va.imperf.3sg demon.ins.sg
“(Many times it had seized him, and though he was chained hand and
foot and kept under guard,) he had broken his chains and had been
driven by the demon (into solitary places).”
(Zographensis, Luke 8.29)
b. kai diarrēssōn ta desma
and dia.break.prsp.m.nom.sg the chain.acc.pl
ēlauneto hupo tou daimoniou
drive.imperf.pass.3sg by the demon.gen.sg
“(Many times it had seized him, and though he was chained hand and
foot and kept under guard,) he had broken his chains and had been
driven by the demon (into solitary places).”
(GNT, Luke 8.29)

The unprefixed and underived trьz-a-ti “tear” is attested in the Suprasliensis, so

this could be its perfective partner. A perfective imperfect reading is thus not
impossible. However, it seems quite likely that we may instead be dealing with a
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

homographic pair here, i.e. the suffix-derived partner of this verb might have the
same shape at least in some parts of its paradigm as the prefixed underived verb
(see also Kukuškina & Ševeleva 1991: 43–44 for more general problems with dis-
tinguishing between derived and underived verbs with the a(j) suffix). Note that
a number of other formations on the pattern prefix + trьzati (with vъz-, otъ- and
pro-, but not po-) generally seem to be imperfective.33
Apart from these three examples,34 there is a small number of examples
of prefixed speech or thought verbs where the imperfect attestations do not
have the semantics suggested in the literature for perfective imperfects. The
verb otъ-věšt-a-ti “answer” has a prefix–suffix combination that suggests a
secondary imperfective verb, but it also has a clearly imperfective partner in
otъ-věšt-ava-ti. Otъ-věšt-a-ti regularly occurs in the aorist in our material, but
has a single imperfect occurrence (22).35 This occurrence does not seem to be
telic-iterative.
(22) a. onъ že mlъčaase ničьsože
he.nom.sg ptc be-silent.a.imperf.3sg nothing.gen.sg
ne otъveštaase
not otъ.answer.jaj.imperf.3sg
“But he kept silent and did not answer.”
(Marianus, Mark 14.61)
b. ho de esiōpa kai ouk
he. nom.sg ptc be-silent.imperf.3sg and not
apekrinato ouden
apo.answer.aor.3sg nothing.n.acc.sg
“But he kept silent and did not answer.”
(GNT, Mark 14.61)

.  Note also that we find the opposite pattern with the similarly shaped sъ-tęz-a-ti “quarrel,
discuss”, which has a lone aorist occurrence (Marianus/Zographensis, Matthew 25.19) beside
a number of imperfect occurrences. The related verb is-tęz-a-ti “ask, demand” has attestations
that suggest that it is a homographic pair with different present tense forms for the perfective
and imperfective partners (Cejtlin et al. 1994: 273).
.  In addition there are two cases of imperfect attestations of low-frequency prefixed verbs
with apparent derived partners, but we have no evidence that any of them are perfective, as
there are no aorist attestations of either of them. This is the case with vъ-měst-i-ti/vъ-měšt-a-ti
“contain, hold” and na-zьr-ě-ti/na-zir-a-ti “watch (over)”. Moreover, the imperfect attestations
have stative or progressive readings.
.  It also has present participle attestations in the Codex Suprasliensis.
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

Similarly, we have three imperfect and two present-participle attestations of raz-

um-ě-ti “understand”.36 The verb has a partner raz-um-ěva-ti, which comes out
as low-frequency imperfective (-ipfv(<4)) in our classification (and it has a sin-
gle present participle occurrence). Hence, we would expect raz-um-ě-ti to be an
explicitly perfective verb, and it does predominantly have aorist occurrences.37
Neither of the unexpected imperfect/present participle attestations seem to be
telic-iterative, but rather seem to have static ability readings. It may be that speech
and thought verbs are generally prone to unstable aspectual behaviour, given, as
Bermel (1997: 361) points out, that their endpoint cannot easily be separated from
their duration, see also §4.3.
Overtly marked perfective imperfects, then, are not reliably attested in the
Marianus and Zographensis, while in the Suprasliensis, they are. If the ‘perfec-
tive imperfect’ were a regular way of expressing iterated telic events in the system
reflected in the two manuscripts, we would expect to see such examples attested,
since such events are quite frequent in the Gospels. Instead, we see that such events
are regularly expressed by prefixed and suffix-derived verbs in the imperfect, i.e.
by overtly imperfective verbs. Since the Suprasliensis is a considerably younger
text than the Marianus and Zographensis, it is possible that its perfective imper-
fect attestations represent an innovation in the system. With this in mind, it is
interesting to take a brief look at Old East Slavic. An examination of the ­Primary
­Chronicle, which in the Laurentian manuscript is almost exactly the same length
as the OCS tetraevangelia,38 reveals that the distribution of tense forms across
verbs is remarkably similar in early OCS and Kiev-era Old Russian. The majority
of verbs have specialized with a single inflectional aspect, and the relatively few
verbs that occur in both inflectional aspects are typically unprefixed and under-
ived. However, this group of verbs also contains a number of ‘textbook’ perfective
imperfects with clear telic-iterative semantics. The difference between the non-
attestation in early OCS, very scarce attestation in later OCS and reliable and clear
attestation in Old East Slavic several centuries later could be interpreted as evi-
dence of a diachronic development.39 Perhaps, then, the system found in modern
Bulgarian is not an archaism, but a considerable expansion of that innovation.

.  razuměaxǫ (Marianus/Zographensis, Luke 18.34 and Zographensis, Mark 9.32). For the
present participle examples, see Marianus/Zographensis, Luke 8.42.
.  Note that the verb may possibly be denominal, from razumъ “mind, understanding”.
.  The Primary Chronicle: 55,431 word tokens in the TOROT, Marianus: 58,259 word
tokens, Zographensis: 52,182. All data for this comparison were drawn from the TOROT
version of the Primary Chronicle in December 2014, see supplementary material G online.
.  Note that Darden (2004) interprets the same facts as evidence for the perfective imper-
fect as a ‘preserved archaism’ in Old East Slavic.
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

4.3  No aorists from explicitly imperfective verbs

Again, the visualisations in supplementary material C show us a very clear trend.
Overtly marked imperfective verbs, i.e. suffix-derived partners in type 2 and 4
pairs, do not occur as aorists or past participles, even when the corresponding
Greek verb does. This behaviour is very different from the behaviour of the unpre-
fixed and underived partners in type 3 pairs, which occur fairly freely in the aorist.
Closer examination of the data again leads us to claim that there are no convincing
examples of overtly marked imperfective verbs in the aorist or past participle in
the Marianus and Zographensis material.40
Only three examples in our material pose a serious challenge to this claim.
The most interesting example is (23): a past active participle attestation of iz-
da-ja-ti “give out, pay”, found in the same passage in both the Marianus and the
­Zographensis. The verb is clearly derived from iz-da-ti. The partner is not attested
in the dataset at all, but Cejtlin et al. (1994) lists three attestations of iz-da-ti (clas-
sified as perfective) and six of iz-da-ja-ti (classified as imperfective/perfective).
The form could possibly be interpreted as a complexive aorist with internal struc-
ture (iterative): did the woman keep giving out money until there was no money
left? This is an expected reading for the imperfective aorist (cf. Comrie 1976: 23).
(23) a. i žena sǫšti vъ točenii
and woman.nom.sg be.prsp.f.nom.sg in flow.loc.sg
krъve. otъ dъvojǫ na desęte
blood.gen.sg from two.gen on ten.loc
lětu. ěže baliěmъ
year.gen.du rel.f.nom.sg doctor.dat.pl
izdaěvъši vьse iměnie. ni otъ
iz.give.jaj.pstp.f.nom.sg all.n.acc.sg property.acc.sg not from
edinogo že ne može iscělěti
one.m.gen.sg ptc not can.aor.3sg iz.heal.ě.inf
“A woman suffering from bleeding for 12 years, who had spent all
she had on doctors yet could not be healed by any, (approached from
behind and touched the tassel of His robe. Instantly her bleeding
stopped.)”
(Marianus, Luke 8.43–44)
b. kai gunē ousa en rhusei
and woman.nom.sg be.prsp.f.nom.sg in flow.dat.sg

.  This section is based on careful examination of prefixed verbs in the ~ipfv category,
­unprefixed, suffixed verbs in the ~ipfv category and prefixed and suffixed verbs in the -pfv(<4)
category.
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

haimatos apo etōn dōdeka hētis

blood.gen.sg from year.gen.pl twelve rel.f.nom.sg
iatrois prosanalōsasa holon ton
doctor.dat.pl pros.spend.aorp.f.nom.sg whole.m.acc.sg the
bion ouk iskhusen ap’
property.acc.sg not be-able.aor.3sg from
oudenos therapeuthēnai
nobody.m.gen.sg heal.aor.inf.pass
“A woman suffering from bleeding for 12 years, who had spent all she
had on doctors yet could not be healed by any, (approached from behind
and touched the tassel of His robe. Instantly her bleeding stopped.)”
(GNT, Luke 8.43–44)

There is also a single aorist example of pri-zyv-a-ti “call, invite” (24), which is well
attested in the imperfect and as present participles and which is transparently
derived from pri-zъv-a-ti (-pfv). The Marianus has the aorist of pri-zъv-a-ti (-pfv)
in this passage, so this could potentially be an error. It is not obvious that Jesus
issues more than one invitation in this context.
(24) a. i vъzide na gorǫ i prizyva
and vъz.go.aor.3sg on mountain.acc.sg and pri.call.aj.aor.3sg
jęže samъ vъsxotě
rel.m.acc.pl self.m.nom.sg vъz.want.ě.aor.3sg
“And he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he
desired.”
(Zographensis, Mark 3.13)
b. kai anabainei eis to oros kai proskaleitai
and ana.go.prs.3sg in the mountain.acc.sg and pros.call.prs.3sg
hous ēthelen autos
rel.m.acc.pl want.aor.3sg self.m.nom.sg
“And he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he
desired.”
(GNT, Mark 3.13)

Third, there is a passage where both the Marianus and the Zographensis have past
passive participle occurrences of o-pravьd-a-ti “justify” (partnered by o-pravьd-
i-ti) corresponding to a Greek perfect participle and referring to the resulting state
after a single act of justification.41

.  opravъdanъ (Marianus and Zographensis, Luke 18.14).

 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

Apart from this, there is a small number of apparently overtly imperfective

speech or thought verbs with aorist and past participle occurrences.42 As men-
tioned in §4.2, such verbs seem prone to aspectual instability. There is a single
aorist attestation of vъ-praš-a-ti in the data set, also noted by Amse-De Jong
(1974: 51), which is partnered by the consistently perfective vъ-pros-i-ti. In the
example, a single question is being asked (25).43
(25) a. vъpraša že godiny otъ nixъ vъ
vъ.ask.aj.aor.3sg ptc hour.gen.sg from he.gen.pl in
kǫjǫ sulěe emu bys
rel.f.acc.sg better he.dat.sg be.aor.3sg
“So he asked them when he got better.”
(Marianus, John 4.52)
b. eputheto oun tēn hōran par’ autōn en
ask.aor.3sg ptc the hour.acc.sg from he.gen.pl in
hēi kompsoteron eskhen
rel.f.dat.sg better have.aor.3sg
“So he asked them when he got better.”
(GNT, John 4.52)

Prefixed speech verbs in -vědati tend to occur both in the imperfect and the aorist,
even though they appear to be derived from prefixed verbs in -věděti (see supple-
mentary material B online). For instance, there is a single past passive participle
occurrence of pro-po-věd-a-ti “preach, proclaim”, apparently derived from pro-po-
věd-ě-ti, which comes out as a low-frequency perfective in our classification.44
As for the rest of the OCS canon, no convincing examples of derived imperfec-
tive aorists from other texts are cited in the literature. In our comparison with Old
East Slavic, we found that possible examples were few and difficult to interpret.

.  In addition to the listed examples, there is also one aorist attestation of a prefixed
­indeterminate verb, izgonixomъ “drove out” (Marianus, Matthew 7.22). As Amse-De Jong
(1974: 63) points out, it is not obvious that such verbs should have the same semantics as pre-
fixed derived imperfective verbs, since they are not derived from the (perfective, determinate)
iz-gъn-a-ti. Amse-De Jong suggest that such verbs could be indeterminate (non-directional)
and aspectually neutral, with the meaning “drive out in all directions”.
.  The Zographensis has the same verb in the imperfect in this passage. Amse-De Jong
(1974: 51) makes a case for this verb being an aspectually neutral verb, not perceived as
prefixed at the period of writing. It is well-attested in both aorist and past participle in the
­Suprasliensis.
.  propovědano (Marianus, Mark 14.9).
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

Forsyth (1972: 505) may thus be right in referring to this form as a “non-starter”

in Old Russian texts. We take this as confirmation of our prediction, both for OCS
and a wider Early Slavic context. In sum, it is clear that the oldest attestations of
OCS, Marianus and Zographensis, do not exhibit the ‘mismatched’ forms perfec-
tive imperfect and imperfective aorist: these forms only appear later.

5.  Interpreting the change

The synchronic analysis in the previous sections puts us in a position to consider

the genesis and further development of the Slavic bounder perfectives.

5.1  From telicity to aspect

Our analysis of the oldest OCS data has shown that at that stage, the language
had two exponents of aspect, one inflectional (only in the past tense and in the
participles) and one derivational (in general use). The derivational exponent is
an innovation compared to PIE, so the question naturally arises how we should
understand that change.
As we noted in the introduction, the prefixes that end up as perfective aspect
markers in Slavic started out as ‘bounders’,45 i.e. adverbs that expressed a sense of
completion, as in English eat up. How did they come to express aspect?
The key, we believe, is a pragmatic reinterpretation known as ‘default aspect’
(Bohnemeyer & Swift 2004), i.e. the tendency to understand telic event descrip-
tions perfectively, and atelic event descriptions imperfectively, in situations where
there is no overt aspectual marking. This is illustrated in the following example
from Standard German, which lacks aspectual morphology altogether:
(26) a. Als wir in Nijmegen eintrafen, regnete es
when we in Nijmegen arrive.pst, rain.pst it
“When we arrived in Nijmegen, it was raining.”
b. Als wir in Nijmegen eintrafen, regnete es eine Stunde lang
when we in Nijmegen arrive.pst, rain.pst it one hour for
“When we arrived in Nijmegen, it rained for an hour.”

.  The use of an adverb as a bounder may or may not be accompanied by bleaching of the
lexical content. The loss of lexical content is at least partly a pre-Slavic phenomenon, as we
find bleached preverbs in most branches of IE. Of particular interest here is the preverb *k’om
seen in Latin co(m)-, Old Irish com-, probably Greek kata- and likely one of the origins of
Slavic sъ-.
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

In (26a), the atelic event description regnete es gets an imperfective interpreta-

tion, which means that it is understood as encompassing the event of us arriving
in Nijmegen. In (26b), however, by far the most natural reading of the telic event
description regnete es eine Stunde lang is the perfective one, where the rain starts
when we arrive.
As Bohnemeyer & Swift (2004) show, this effect is only an implicature in
­German, and it can be cancelled in certain contexts. However, it is well known
that implicatures can develop into core (i.e. non-cancellable) meanings through
the process of ‘pragmatic strengthening’ (Traugott 1988; Eckardt 2006).
Let us illustrate how we imagine this process at work in the early Slavic verbal
system, using tvor-i-ti as an example. The core meaning of this verb is atelic “do,
engage in”. At an early stage, the prefixation in sъ-tvor-i-ti will have derived a telic
meaning “do (with a result), finish, accomplish”. From that prefixed formation, it
would be possible to derive a suffixed stem such as sъ-tvar-ja-ti. Assuming with
the common opinion that such suffixes also expressed Aktionsart – in this case
iterativity – the original meaning of sъ-tvar-ja-ti would be “accomplish repeatedly”.
About the next steps we can only speculate, and the details are not important
for our account, but a plausible scenario is the following: The explicitly telic for-
mation sъ-tvor-i-ti will have invited the default aspect implicature as a perfective
form. This could be strengthened to an entailment so that the form actually came
to encode perfectivity. Thereby the verb became incompatible with imperfective
aspect in the inflectional system. As we have shown in §4.2, this is essentially the
state of affairs that obtains in early OCS. Notice that these prefixed formations
retain their telic meaning through this process and in fact all the way to modern
Slavic: that is the reason why regular perfectives cannot have complexive readings
in modern Slavic, as we observed in the introduction.
Similarly, the explicitly atelic formation sъ-tvar-ja-ti would have invited the
implicature of an imperfective reading, which could be strengthened so that the
form ended up encoding imperfectivity. Again, this would make the verb incom-
patible with perfective inflectional forms. This stage is attested in early OCS, as
shown in §4.3. This process is thus the mirror image of what happened to the
prefixed telic verbs, and it is possible that the two processes happened in tandem.46
The question now is why early OCS – and Slavic more generally – went
so far in systematizing these strengthened implicatures, especially through the
use of secondary imperfectivization, which is not found in other bounder-based

.  Maslov (2004: 471–473) speculates that the iterative-telic partners actually became
­imperfective before the prefixed telic verbs became perfective, leaving the latter aspectually
neutral for a while.
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

systems. Crucially, the pragmatic strengthening sketched above did not hap-
pen in a vacuum. Our synchronic analysis of the OCS data clearly shows that
it happened at a stage when the inherited inflectional aspectual opposition still
existed. Therefore, strengthened forms would be interpreted as part of a para-
digmatic opposition between perfective and imperfective forms, and moreover,
they would offer a way of generalizing this distinction outside of the past tense
and the participles.
Importantly, from the fact that the telic formation sъ-tvor-i-ti took on perfec-
tive meaning and the atelic formation sъ-tvar-ja-ti took on imperfective meaning,
nothing immediately follows for the semantics of the base form tvor-i-ti. The
simplex stem was aspectually neutral to start with and remains so in early OCS.
This provides us with a means to contrast the old and the new systems: In the new
system, as we saw, aspect and telicity are interdependent, and so there is no com-
plexive reading of ordinary perfectives. By contrast, in the old system retained by
aspectually neutral verbal formations, the aorist can have a complexive reading, as
we will now show.

5.2  Complexive readings of neutral, atelic verbs

There are 60 verbs in our dataset that come out as either aspectually neutral or
predominantly imperfective in our classification, and in this group we expect
to find neutral, atelic verbs. The majority of these verbs are neither prefixed nor
­suffix-derived. We find that complexive readings of aorists are fairly common with
these verbs and attested with 27 of them (e.g. plak-a-ti “cry”, ži-ti “live”, trěb-ova-ti
“need”).47 The OCS complexive aorists do not always render Greek complexive
aorists.
(27) a. sedmь bo ixъ iměšę jǫ ženǫ
seven.nom for he.gen.pl have.ě.aor.3pl she.acc.sg wife.acc.sg
“For all seven were married to her.”
(Marianus, Mark 12.23)
b. hoi gar hepta eskhon autēn gunaika
the.m.nom.pl ptc seven have.aor.3pl she.acc.sg wife.acc.sg
“For all seven were married to her.”
(GNT, Mark 12.23)

.  For a complete set of aorist occurrences of neutral and vacillating but predominantly
imperfective verbs, motion verbs and the extremely frequent verb glagol-a-ti “say” excluded,
see supplementary material F online http://hdl.handle.net/10037.1/10158. The data set also
includes a tentative classification of aorist meanings.
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

(28) a. vidita město ideže leža xъ

see.ě.imp.2du place.acc.sg where lie.ja.aor.3sg Christ.nom
“Come, see the place where He was lying.”
(Marianus, Matthew 28.6)
b. deute idete ton topon
over.here see.aor.imp.2pl the place.acc.sg
hopou ekeito
where lie.imperf.3sg
“Come, see the place where He was lying.”
(GNT, Matthew 28.6)

Interestingly, some of the complexive examples approach general-factual readings.

The complexive reading denotes an activity or state that lasted for some time in
the past, so we expect it to be close in meaning to the general-factual meaning
which is expressed by the imperfective in modern Russian. However there is noth-
ing inherently imperfective in the semantics of the general-factual reading, which
is precisely why it has engendered so much discussion (Padučeva 1996; Grønn
2003). It is interesting in this regard to note that Kukuškina & Ševeleva (1991)
concluded that the general-factual reading does not occur with explicitly (prefixed
and derived) imperfective verbs in Old Russian until the 16th century, only with
aspectually unmarked verbs, which are exactly the ones that take a complexive
aorist in our Marianus and Zographensis material.
(29) a. ěsmь prědъ tobojǫ i pixomъ i na
eat.aor.1pl before you.inst.sg and drink.aor.1pl and on
raspǫtiixъ učilъ esi
crossroad.loc.pl teach.i.l-ptcp.m.nom.pl be.prs.2sg
“We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.”
(Marianus, Luke 13.26)
b. ephagomen enōpion sou kai epiomen, kai en tais
eat.aor.1pl before you.gen.sg and drink.aor.1pl and in the
plateiais hēmōn edidaxas
street.dat.pl we.gen teach.aor.2sg
“We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.”
(GNT, Luke 13.26)

At this stage there is no established prefixation pattern that can express the same
meaning – we see a few verbs using the po- prefix to express similar meanings, but
this is rare and unsystematic (cf. Maslov 2004: 468). When we look at the aspectual
pairs in group 3 in §4.1 (see supplementary material E online http://hdl.handle.
net/10037.1/10158), we find that the prefixed partners of unprefixed underived
 Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic 

verbs fall into three ­specialized groups: completive verbs (na-pьs-a-ti “write (and
finish)”), ingressive verbs (mostly prefixed with vъzъ-, vъz-alъk-a-ti “become hun-
gry”) and a small group of arguably complexive/delimitative verbs (mostly pre-
fixed with po-, po-mol-i-ti “pray (for a while)”). There is no evidence that, e.g.
na-pьs-a-ti could ever have a complexive reading in the aorist. We also see that
the complexive verb po-mol-i-ti is contrasted by the completive verb u-mol-i-ti
“implore (and have the request fulfilled)”. We conclude that in OCS, at least as
attested in the Marianus and Zographensis, the aorist is the primary means of
expressing the complexive meaning.
Note that neutral simplices fairly frequently have ingressive readings in the
aorist as well (found with 14 of the verbs in supplementary material F http://hdl.
handle.net/10037.1/10158), which is expected given the system we observe in
Greek and other IE languages (see §2.2). For example, the aorist form of plak-a-ti
“cry” may mean either “burst into tears” (30a) or “cry for a while” (31a).
(30) a. i išedъ vonъ plaka sę gorьko
and iz.walk.pstp.m.nom.sg away cry.a.aor.3sg refl bitterly
“And he went outside and wept bitterly.”
(Marianus, Matthew 26.75)
b. kai ekselthōn eksō eklausen pikrōs
and ek.go.aorp.m.nom.sg out weep.aor.3sg bitterly
“And he went outside and wept bitterly.”
(GNT, Matthew 26.75)
(31) a. plakaxomъ vamъ i ne rydaste
cry.a.aor.1pl you.dat.pl and not wail.aj.aor.2pl
“We cried, but you did not wail.”
(Marianus, Matthew 11.17)
b. ethrēnēsamen kai ouk ekopsasthe
mourn.aor.1pl and not ek.wail.aor.2pl
“We cried, but you did not wail.”
(GNT, Matthew 11.17)

In this reading the aorist of simplex verbs already has strong competition from the
specialized ingressive prefix vъz-, which is well established, but not yet obligatory
in the Marianus and Zographensis data.
We therefore conclude that the OCS aorist still had independent func-
tions that new prefixed perfectives did not have. We thus have a situation where
both the old and new systems were active and different: the old system keeps
the ­telicity-independent expression of aspect inherited from PIE, whereas the
Aktions­art derivations have been grammaticalized as a new aspectual system that
is strongly interconnected with the expression of (a)telicity.
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

6.  Conclusions

The history of the Slavic aspect system follows one of the known grammaticaliza-
tion paths for perfective markers, that of the so-called ‘bounder perfectives’. The
Slavic languages are known to have developed especially far along this path, and
display particularly developed and pervasive bounder perfective systems. In order
to examine how these systems arose and developed, we use Greek and OCS paral-
lel data to establish the synchronic situation in the oldest OCS sources (specifically
the Codices Marianus and Zographensis).
How aspect is expressed is a contentious issue in Slavic historical linguistics:
We have argued that both the inflectional system inherited from PIE and the deri-
vational system that is later continued into the modern Slavic languages are expo-
nents of aspect in early OCS. The old system exists only in the past tense and in the
participles, but it is found with all verbs. The new system exists in all forms of the
verb, but it is not fully generalized through the lexicon: there are still verbs that do
not partake in the derivational system.
This means that early OCS attests an interesting stage of the language where
there are two partially overlapping exponents of aspect. There is also an interest-
ing semantic difference between the two systems: The old system expresses only
aspect, whereas the new system bundles perfectivity and telicity in a way that Dahl
has argued is characteristic of the Slavic languages. The clearest effect of this is
the fact that the old aspectual system can express complexive readings, which are
unavailable in the new system.
The new system’s bundling of perfectivity and telicity finds a natural explana-
tion in its origin: We have argued that perfectivity arose as the strengthening of an
implicature associated with telic verbal formations. In this respect, Bybee & Dahl
(1989: 97) are right that the Slavic bounder perfectives are well understood “as an
instantiation of a range on a path of development, comparable to other perfec-
tives from similar sources and at similar stages of development”, rather than as a
member of a supercategory of aspect. On the other hand, Bybee & Dahl (1989) do
acknowledge that the Slavic bounder perfectives are much more systematic than
similar grams found in other languages. This aspect of their development can only
be understood by considering the supercategory of aspect as a whole at the crucial
stage that we see in early OCS, where the bounder perfectives do their work in
tight integration with the old, inherited category of aspect.

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Résumé

Dans cet article nous étudions une piste de grammaticalisation de l’aspectualité

perfective, celle du ‘perfectif limitant’ (‘bounder perfective’, Bybee et Dahl 1989).
Les systèmes (dits ‘de type slave’) qui possèdent un tel aspect perfectif se sont
particulièrement développés dans les langues slaves. Pour savoir pourquoi, nous
examinons la question difficile de la relation entre le vieux système aspectuel que
le slavon a héritée de l’indo-européen et qui est fondé sur la morphologie flexion-
nelle, et le nouveau système qui se développe déjà en vieux-slavon, et qui est fondé
sur la morphologie dérivationnelle, comme dans les langues slaves modernes.
Pour cela nous utilisons les données du corpus parallèle PROIEL. Les slavisants
ont proposé des explications bien diverses sur cette relation: d’aucuns considèrent
que le système flexionnel est le noyau de l’ expression de l’aspect, d’autres que ce
noyau serait le système dérivationnel. Notre analyse statistique montre qu’en effet
le vieux-slavon atteste un état de langue très intéressant où il y a deux expressions
de l’aspect qui se recouvrent partiellement. Ayant ainsi établi les faits du vieux-
slavon, nous pouvons étudier le passé et le futur du système. Nous en concluons
que l’extension poussée du perfectif limitant dans les langues slaves s’explique de
ce qu’il serait né à une époque où l’aspect flexionnel existait encore et aurait herité
certaines fonctions de l’ancien système. Nous proposons aussi que l’interaction
entre les deux systèmes, que l’on trouve en Bulgare moderne, est sans doute une
innovation secondaire.
 Hanne Eckhoff & Dag Haug

Zusammenfassung

In diesem Artikel untersuchen wir den Grammatikalisierungsprozess hin zu den

sogenannten ‘Begrenzungsperfektiva’ (‘bounder perfectives’, Bybee und Dahl
1989). Systeme mit solchen Perfektiva sind in den slavischen Sprachen besonders
ausgebildet. Anhand Altkirchenslavischen (AKS) Daten des PROIEL Korpus
und parallelen griechischen Daten untersuchen wir hier die umstrittene Frage
nach der Verbindung zwischen dem alten, indogermanischen und auf Flexions-
morphologie basierenden System und dem sich im AKS entwickelnden und auf
Derivationsmorphologie basierenden System. In der bisherigen Forschung wird
diese Frage widersprüchlich behandelt. Das Flexionssystem einerseits und das
Derivationssystem anderseits wird als der primäre Ausdruck des Aspekts gesehen.
Unsere statistische Analyse zeigt, dass das Altkirchslavische einen interessanten
Sprachzustand einnimmt, in dem beide Systeme den Aspekt ausdrücken und sich
teilweise überdecken. Das System des AKS ermöglicht es, den Ursprung und die
Weiterentwicklung dieses Systems besser zu verstehen. Dieser Artikel zeigt, dass
die Begrenzungsperfektiva in den slavischen Sprachen aufgrund der Koexistenz
der zwei unterschiedlichen Aspektsysteme so fortgeschritten sind. Wir schla-
gen auch vor, dass die Interaktion zwischen diesen beiden Aspektsystemen im
­Bulgarischen, welches beide Systeme aufweist, eine spätere Entwicklung ist.

Corresponding author’s address

Hanne Eckhoff
Kanonhallveien 10e
0585 Oslo
Norway
hanne.m.eckhoff@uit.no