Expressing Ingressivity in Slavic: The Contextually-Conditioned Imperfective Past vs. the Phase Verb stat' and Procedural za-

Abstract

This article discusses different modes of expressing ingressivity in the Slavic languages – the grammatical expression of ingressivity (by means of imperfective verb forms) and its lexical expression (by means of the use of stat' as an ingressive phase verb or perfective procedural verbs prefixed with za-) – and relates them to one another as two competing systems. It is shown that these phenomena are in complementary distribution: languages that imploy the contextually-conditioned imperfective past to a high degree only imploy stat' and za- to express ingressivity to a very low degree or not at all, and vice-versa. More specifically, the contextually-conditioned imperfective past is characteristic of the extreme western end of Slavic (Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, Slovene), whereas stat' and za- are characteristic of an eastern group of languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorusion, Bulgarian); two languages (Polish and Serbo-Croatian occupy a transitional position between the two groups. Finally, the respective modes of expressing ingressivity are discussed within the theory of Slavic aspect developed in Dickey 1997.