I now turn to VP-ellipsis under aspectual mismatches, i.e. VP-ellipsis where the antecedent and the target are not specified for the same aspect. Since there is more than one way to obtain perfective or imperfective aspectual specification (as already shown for imperfective in the previous section), I take that verbs are matching aspectually only if they contain exactly the same aspectual specifications (which will become clearer immediately).
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How do we force the antecedent and the elided VP to mismatch in aspect, i.e. how do we know that what we are eliding is necessarily imperfective or perfective? We can do it by adding an adverbial in the second conjunct that allows only for one aspectual specification. For instance, in (14), the adverbial in the second clause za pet minuta ‘in five minutes’/ jedanput ‘once’ is compatible only with perfective aspect; hence, the elided VP can only be the perfective (more precisely, the root perfective). The antecedent, however, is a root imperfective. As (14) shows, ellipsis is ungrammatical − it is only allowed if there is a match in aspect. Crucially, despite the match in finiteness, the example in (14a) is ungrammatical, as it is with a finite antecedent (14b) – no difference arises.
(14) a. *Petar je satima bacao novine, a Jovan je za pet minuta Petar is hours throw.impf.part. newspaper and Jovan is for five minutes bacio novine.
throw.pf.part. newspaper
‘Petar was throwing the newspaper (in the garbage) for hours, and Jovan has (thrown the newspaper (in the garbage)) in five minutes.’
b. *Petar petkom baca novine, a Jovan je jedanput Petar Friday throws.impf. newspaper and Jovan is one.time bacio novine.
throw.pf.part. newspaper
‘Petar throws the newspaper (in the garbage) every Friday, and Jovan has (thrown the newspaper (in the garbage)) once.’
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Interestingly, the lack of aspectual match does not necessarily mean that VP-ellipsis is excluded. For instance, with the same type of target, i.e. root perfective, and now with a secondary imperfective antecedent, VP ellipsis is allowed with both non-finite and finite antecedents, as shown in (15).
(15) a. Petar je uvek pobeđivao Mariju, a Marko je samo jedanput Petar is always win.impf.part. Marija and Marko is only one.time pobedio Mariju.
won.pf.part. Marija
‘Petar has always been defeating Marija, while Marko has (defeated Marija) only once.’
b. Petar uvek pobeđuje Mariju, a Marko je samo jedanput Petar always wins.impf. Marija and Marko is only one.time pobedio Mariju.
win.pf.part. Marija
‘Petar is always defeating Marija, while Marko has (defeated Marija) only once.’
Before providing a summary of the available aspectual mismatches, let us take a quick detour into perfective marking in Serbian, and complete the picture of aspectual specifications. Besides perfective already being specified in the root, Serbian also makes use of a variety of perfective prefixes.51 Milićević (2004) provides a number of syntactic and semantic diagnostics to argue that perfective prefixes can be classified into two groups: lexical and superlexical prefixes. She
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argues that lexical prefixes change lexical properties of the verb stem, affecting their argument structure. For instance, while the root perfective skočiti ‘to jump’ in (16a) does not require any arguments, it does require one when we add the prefix iz- in (16b), specifally, it requires a PP argument denoting location. In that respect, lexical prefixes like iz- modify the lexical aspectual properties of the event, i.e. they can be classified as markers of lexical aspect.52
(16) a. Skočio je. jump.pf.part.masc.sg. is ‘He has jumped.’
b. Iskočio je kroz prozor. out.jumped-pf.part.masc.sg. is through window ‘He jumped out of the window.’
(Milićević 2004:289)
Milićević also argues that not all prefixes are the same: in (17), the iz- that is closer to the stem makes the same contribution as the prefix in (16b), whereas the word initial iz- in (17) only marks the completion of the event, without contributing any lexical change. The former is lexical, while the latter is classified as superlexical.
52 Note that Milićević argues that all perfective prefixes, including lexical prefixes, also contribute the information that the event is bounded, i.e. the viewpoint aspect information.
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(17) Iz- po- iz- bacivao je sve flaše iz kuhinje. 53 cmpl-dstr-out- throw.pf.part.masc.sing. is all bottles from kitchen
‘He threw out all of the bottles from the kitchen.’ (Milićević 2004:293)
Given the contribution that the superlexical perfective makes, i.e. affecting the boundedness of the event, it can preliminarily be classified as viewpoint aspect. It is then not surprising that in Milićević’s analysis superlexical prefixes are structurally higher than the lexical ones, if the latter is lexical aspect, argued to be within the VP, while viewpoint aspect is usually argued to be in AspP (cf. section 3.1.2). I return to the precise location and nature of superlexical prefixes in more detail in section 3.5.
We finally have the full aspectual inventory with five different nuances at hand: root perfective, lexically derived perfective (henceforth derived perfective), superlexically derived perfective, root imperfective, and secondary imperfective.
Table 1 below displays the availability of ellipsis under all five possible aspectual combinations of the antecedent (both finite and non-finite) and the non-finite target. The focus in sections 3.3 and 3.4 will be placed on the mismatches in grey boxes. As noted above, I will be providing only examples with participial targets and participial and finite antecedents, respectively; infinitival targets will be provided only when the availability of VP-ellipsis is affected by the choice of the participial or infinitival target; otherwise, the two types of targets behave in the same way. A full paradigm of examples of aspectual mismatches is given in the Appendix.
91 Target Secondary imperfective Derived perfective Root perfective Root imperfective Superlexical perfective Antecedent Root imperfective * * * * (with part. targets) *
Root perfective √ * √ √ (with
non-finite antec.) * Secondary imperfective √ √ √ * * Derived perfective √ √ * * * Superlexical perfective * * * * √
Table 1: The availability of ellipsis of non-finite targets affected by aspect