René Genis

Research - Main areas of interest

• Comparative Slavic Verbal Aspect
Earlier publications tended to treat Slavic verbal aspect as a undifferentiated category for all Slavic languages, and matters were most often dealt with on the basis of Russian. During the last decade of the 20th century, and especially since the publication of Stephen Dickey's Parameters of Slavic Aspect (Stanford, California 2000) research is establishing more and more, that there are considerable differences between the various aspectual systems of the individual Slavic languages. We may actually speak of languages that are more or less typical of the eastern aspectual variant (Russian, Ukrainian) and those that are more or less typical of the western aspectual variant (Czech, Sorbian). Others could be positioned in between these aspectualextremities and show transitionalsystems(Polish, Croatian).
   Under the leadership of dr. Adrie Barentsen a number of researchers at the University of Amsterdam have united in what we call "The Amsterdam Slavic Aspect Circle" to discuss and research the Slavic languages that are included in our teaching curriculum. These are: Adrie Barentsen for Russian, Radovan Lučić and Janneke Kalsbeek for Croatian and Serbian, Magda van Duijkeren- Hrabová for Czech and René Genis for Polish. 
   Extensive use is made of ASPAC (Amsterdam Slavic Parallel Aligned Corpus) which is compiled and maintained by Adrie Barentsen.
   Our current research deals mostly with the use of aspect in repetitive events. In compound sentences in the past Polish is clearly half-way between Russian (which would have imperfective verbs in both main and secondary clauses) and Czech (which has perfective verbs in both clauses) as it allows both perfective and imperfective verbs in secondary clauses. Our aim is to establish how this functions and what semantic complications play a part in the choice between the two aspectual forms.

Dr. A.A. Barentsen

Dr. J. Kalsbeek

Drs. Radovan Lučić

• Verbal prefixation
The study of verbal prefixes in Slavic language such as Polish is many faceted. Prefixes carry a meaning that often seems quite fuzzy. The core meaning, the ‘invariant’, of a prefix can only be established by comparison of the meanings, the ‘variants’, of all the compound verbs in which it occurs.
   Partly on account of their lexical meaning, prefixes have an "effect" on grammatical matters, especially on verbal aspect - a category such as number with "values" singular and plural -, which is quite cumbersome to the non-native speaker student of Slavic languages.
   Since a prefix adds meaning to a verb, the centre of a clause, it also plays a decisive role in the final make up of such a clause. These restrictions are quite specific.
   For my PhD dissertation I have tackled the Polish prefix prze-in a somewhat untraditional way; rather than concentrateon one of thefacets mentioned above, I have studied all of these for a single prefix.
   I currently work in a similar fashion on other verbal prefixes and I include more and more comparisons with cognate prefixes from other (Slavic) languages, most notably Czech.

Teaching

subjects include:
- Polish language acquisition (Grammar)
- Polish linguistics
- Czech historical linguistics and fonetics/fonology
For more information follow the links below.

BA programme Slavic Languages and Cultures

MA programma Slavic Languages and Cultures

Subjects by Genis

Polish - Dutch dictionary

Since 1997 I have worked on the compilation of a Polish Dutch dictionary and I am now the chief editor. It will be published bij Uitgeverij Pegasus in the near future (November 2009). The second part, Dutch - Polish, will be published atthesametime and was made at the Universities of Warsaw and Wrocław, whilst work was finalised at the University of Amsterdam.

Uitgeverij Pegasus