A.A. Barentsen

Research

General characterization of my field of research: Semantics of verbal categories in Slavic with special focus on the interaction with particles and conjunctions.

     A central interest of mine has always been the category of aspect in Russian. My present general theoretical views on this subject are reflected in (1995a) and (1998b). The articles (1992), (1994) and (1997) contain a detailed analysis of a case of “aspectual synonymy”: the use of the aspects in contexts of delimited repetition.
     These articles reflect my conviction, that a proper understanding of linguistic categories as ‘Aspect’, ‘Tense’ and ‘Modality’ can be attained only on the basis of a thorough and detailed study of the uses of the relevant forms in various contexts. In choosing such a data-oriented approach to linguistic analysis I am clearly influenced by my teacher Carl Ebeling. This approach isalready manifest in my earliest articles, for instance in my work on the interaction of Tense and Aspect with the conjunction poka ((1973b), (1979a), (1980b), (1983)). In this period the examples had to be collected mostly “by hand”, but as soon as it became possible I began to produce and collect electronic corpora of texts which could be searched by concordance programs.
     In studying temporal phenomena, I am mainly occupied with the field of ‘Taxis’ – the expression of temporal relations between the situations described in the text. This is reflected in my work on the use of gerunds (1988), cases of ‘relative tense’ ((1995b), (1996) and (2001)) and the semantics of temporal connectives. My more recent work on temporal connectives is characterized by a contrastive approach, using data from different languages. In (1999a) Russian conjunctions of anteriority are contrasted with their counterparts in English and in (1999b) with Dutch. In (2006a) I compare English till/until with its equivalents in Russian and Polish. In (2006a) and (2006b) the “delimiting conjunctions” of Russian, Polish and Serbian are compared. As part of a project initiated by the Institute of linguistic research of the Russian Academy of Sciences I wrote a comprehensive account of taxis in Dutch (2009).
     As a result of my work on temporal connectives and relative tense I developed a special interest for the various constructions of ‘verbs of waiting/expectation’ (Russian ždat’ and its derivations) ((1980a), (1980b), (1981), (1998a)). The last mentioned article is a first attempt of mine to study diachronic variation on the basis of the analysis of a considerable number of (electronic) texts from the first half of the 19th to the second half of the 20th century. A comparable diachronical investigation is (2003a) in which I study changes in the use of different adhortative expressions in Russian over the lasttwocenturies.
     In (1998b) I made some preliminary notes on comparative Slavic aspectology. This interest is reflected also in (2002),where the use of the specific perfective modal verbs smoč’ and sumet’ (‘to be able to’) of modern Russian is compared with equivalent constructions in some other Slavic languages. More recently (2008a) I studied the differences between the Slavic languages in choosing aspect in compound sentences expressing repeated past consecutive events. It is my conviction that at the present stage of the study of Slavic Aspect such contrastive work is highly necessary, in view of various interesting differences between particular groups of the Slavic languages. I cooperate with colleagues from the Chair of Slavic linguistics in the framework of an ACLC researchgroup on comparative Slavic aspectology. Here the emphasis lies on Russian, Polish, Czech and Serbian/Croatian. For this type of research we expect to find valuable material in parallel texts in the various Slavic languages. Therefore I spend considerable effort and time on the development of this corpus (ASPAC = Amsterdam Slavic Parallel Aligned Corpus).