В. Храковский - 40 лет Санкт-Петербургской типологической школе
(10) Navremeto toj bil izpraten ot vujčo si <…> da
at time.the he was send.PPP.SG.M of uncle REFL.DAT DA
sledva v Moskva
study.PRES-3SG in Moscow
«At that time, he was sent by his uncle to study in Moscow».
Russian (quoted by [Knjazev 1988: 351])(11) Vsesteny, bojnicy, kryšy,<…> v sčitannye sekundy byli all walls loop.holes roofs in count.PF.PPP seconds were zapolneny soldatami i kazakami
occupy.PF.PPP soldiers.INSTR and Cossacks.INSTR
«Within a few seconds all the walls, loop-holes, roofs, minaret balconies and even the dome of the mosque had been occupied by soldiers and Cossacks».
(12) Vsego 45 minut by I vključe-n teleskop,
in total 45 minutes was switch.on.PF-PPP telescope
a podgotovka к eksperimentu potrebovala vos'mi časov.
«It was only for 45 minutes that the telescope was switched on, whereas the preparation for the experiment had taken about eight hours».
It is well known that Polish is the only Slavic language which has two auxiliaries to form the periphrastic passive voice: the zostać passive which imposes a perfective participle and whose meaning is characterised as «actional», and the «be»-passive, which allows both the perfective participle and the imperfective and which, depending on the context, may take on either a so-called stative meaning or a so-called actional meaning:
(13a) Pokój został pomałowany w zeszłym roku /*dva razy
room became paint.PF.PPP.SG.M in last year/ two times
«The room was painted last year».
(13b) *Pokój został małowany w zeszłym roku
room became paint.IMPF.PPP.SG.M in last year
(13c) Pokój bił pomałowany w zeszłym roku / dvarazy
room was paint.PF.PPP.SG.M in last year / two times
«The room was only painted last year» / «The room was painted last year twice».
(13d) Pokój bił małowany w zeszłym roku
room was paint.IMPF.PPP.SG.M in last year
«The room was painted last year».
Siewierska [1984: 129, 1988: 251] notes that recourse to (13c) implies that the room needs repainting, whereas (13a) does not. If one admits that the passive resultative state determines a property of the patient while at the same time implying a preceding event, and if one takes into account the meaning of zostać «to become», one easily understands that such inferences may be made. Zostać directly links the resultative state to the event serving to highlight the transitional character of the event and to state that the patient's property has been acquired prior to the act of speaking; the adverbial expression is therefore taken as included in the transitional event, which would explain why the periphrastic construction with zostać is incompatible with dva razy «two times», mnogo raz «many times», etc. On the other hand, the «be»-passive with a perfective verb gives priority to the resultative state by only referring to the implied event, leading to ambiguity as to whether the resultative state belongs to the patient (meaning a resultative state) or whether the resultative state only serves to hark back to the event at the origin of the patient's affectation. The adverbial phrase in (13a) is presented as incident to the event, which allows one to understand why iteration is permitted.
The contrast we have just evidenced between these two types of constructions clearly appears in the following two examples, in which the adverbial phrase denoting duration is only allowed in the «be» — passive:
Polish(14a) Pies pzrez cała noc byl uwiązany na łańcuchu
dog through all night was attach.PF.PPP.SG.M on chain
«All night long the dog was (stayed) attached to a chain».
(14b) Pies zostal uwiązany na łańcuchu
dog became attach.PF.PPP.SG.M on chain
«The dog was attached to the chain».
(15a) Nieprzyjaciel jest pokonany
enemy is defeatPF.PPP.SG.M
«The enemy happens to be/is defeated».
(15b) Nieprzyjaciel został pokonany
enemy became defeatPF.PPP.SG.M
«The enemy was defeated» (lit. became defeated).
Let's go back to examples (13). The comparison between (13c) and (13d) reveals another meaning held by the «be» — passive. Only (13d) allows one to consider the situation as a statement about a general resultative state based upon a process which was simply accomplished in the past; it does not allow the iterative meaning possible in (13c). I shall come back to this point with examples taken from Bulgarian.
The classic Russian example dom postroen, which can be transposed into other Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Polish, Czech or Serbo-Croatian), will allow us to show how the distribution of the participial form is partly governed by the opposition between a stative situation and a dynamic situation and partly by the notion of completion, which is conveyed exclusively by the perfective form:
Russian(16a) Dom postroen iz kirpiča
house.NOM built.PF.PPP.SG.M of brick.GEN
«The house is made of brick».
(16b) Dom *(do six por) postroen iz kirpiča
house.NOM (until now) built.PF.PPP.SG.M of brick.GEN
Lit. «The house is still built of brick».
(16c) Bol'šinstvo domov do six por postroe-n-o
most house.GEN.PL until.now built.PF-PPP-SG.NEUTER
iz kirpiča
of brick.GEN
«Most houses are still made of bricks».
(16d) Dom postroen v prošlom godu
house built.PF.PPP.SG.M in past year
«The house was built last year».
In spite of the form postroen «built», which one can consider resultative because of its derivational history, (16a) denotes a permanent state through the specification of a property attributed to the entity (iz kirpiča «of brick»). The construction therefore enters into the adjectival paradigm as confirmed by the adverbials of duration test in (16b). To explain the grammaticality of (16b), following Knjazev [1988: 351] advances the argument that adverbials of duration are incompatible with resultatives denoting irreversible states, but that these adverbials may appear with resultatives «under special conditions» as for example in (16c) where the subject would be plural. Let us note however that the grammaticality of (16c) evidences the interesting problem of the interaction between quantification and aspect which deserves more study. The comparison between (16a) and (16d) shows that the occurrence of the temporal expression allows one to retrieve the event which is at the origin of the resultative state: (16b) is the expression of an actional perfect passive [Maslov 1988: 66].
As mentioned earlier on the subject of Polish, the «be» — passive may be constructed with an imperfective participle; if the verb has an imperfective derivative, two constructions are possible:
Bulgarian(17a) Trevata e/beše okosena *(mnogo păti)
grass.the is/was mow.PF.PPP.SG.F (many times)
(ot studentite)
(by students.the)
«The grass was mowed» (by the students).
(17b) Trevata e/beše kosena (mnogo păti)
grass.the is/was mow.IMPF.PPP.SG.F (many times)
(ot studentite)
(by students.the)
«The grass has been mowed» (many times) (by the students).
(17c) Trevata e/beše okosjavana mnogo
grass.the is/was mow.IMPF.PPP.DERIVATE.SG.F many
păti/vsjaka godina (ot studentite)
times/every year (by students.the)
«The grass is/was mowed many times/every year (by the students)».
In (17a) the meaning is clealy that of a resultative state having its origin in a completed event. As opposed to (17a), in (17b) the resultative state has its origins in an interrupted event; the process is thereby highlighted and means «has been mowed (by someone)» or «has been mowed (by someone)»; Maslov terms this «actional passive present» and «actional passive perfect» respectively. However, according to the tense of the auxiliary and the discourse context, the resultative state may be related to past or future situations.
(18) Ništo za otbeljazvane, osven ednapodrobnost, kojato săšto ne e osobeno ljubopitna: sleden săm. Ne tvărde
follow.IMPF.PPP.SG.M am
nastojčivo i ne osobeno grubo, no săm sleden (B. Rajnov).
am follow.IMPF.PPP.SG.M
«Nothing to report except one detail which is not particularly strange: I'm being followed. Not really regularly, nor brutally, but I'm being followed».
(19) A xlabăt beše pečen <…> po star whereas bread.the was cook.IMPF.PPP.SG.M according old bălgarski običaj
Bulgarian tradition
«Whereas the bread was baked <…> following some old Bulgarian tradition».
(20) Toj znaeše, če osemdeset dekaraniv <…> bjaxa
he knew that eighty acres fields were
kupuvani obsto, no slučajno v prodavatelnija
buy.IMPF.PPP.PL in.common but by.chance in of.sale
akt bjaxa pisani samo na imeto na Valčana.
act were write.IMPF.PPP.PL only at name.the of Valchana
«He knew that eighty acres of field <…> had been bought in common, but that, by pure chance, in the sale document, they had been registered under the sole name of Valchan».
With some merely interrupted processes, the construction becomes compatible with adverbs such as mnogo păti «many times» or često «often». The adverbial form is thus incidental to the event and leads to an iterative interpretation. In other words, in the iterative sense, the event is presented as an open class of events in which neither a first nor a last occurrence may be isolated and the resultative state refers to the general result of all these occurrences.
Going back to example (17c), the participle is derived from a secondary imperfective verbal base, and such forms demand an iterative context; the construction thereby denotes a resultative state which originates from an event presented as a closed class of events which has a first and a last occurrence, even though their number is not always specified.
Due to the verb prefix, each event included in the series is analysed as a completed process. The following two examples make apparent the opposition between this meaning (17a) and that of a resultative state (17b):
(21a) <…> ot dva i polovina veka knjažeskijat dom be
of two and half century of.prince.the house was
opožarjavan mnogo păăti
burn.IMPF.PPP.SG.M several times
«<…> over two and a half centuries the princely residence has been set on fire several times».
(21b) <…> knjažeskijat dom be opožaren predi dva i
of.prince.the house was bum.PF.PPP.PL before two and
polovina veka *mnogo păti
half century several times
«<…> two and a half centuries ago the princely residence was set on fire».
The other Slavic languages have apparently not developped such a mechanism. Yu. Maslov [1988: 79] points out a few scarce examples such as the following in Polish which does not seem to belong to a paradigm as do those in Bulgarian:
(22) Wqgiel jest wydobywa-n-y
coal is mine.IMPF-PPP-SG.M
«Coal is (being) mined»
Descriptions of Serbo-Croatian show the first two variations pointed out for Bulgarian: (23a) and (24a) refer to the resultative state of an accomplished and completed process; (23b) and (24b) refer to the resultative state of processes which is a simply accomplished, apparently barring iteration:
(23a) Travaje/bila pokošena (*seljakom)
grass is/was cut.PF.PPP.SG.F (peasant.INSTR)
«The grass has been cut».
(23b) Trava je košena jutros (*seljakom)
grass is cutlMPF.PPP.SG.F morning (peasant.INSTR)
«The grass is cut in the morning (by the peasants)».
(24a) Kuća je gradena dva mjeseca (*ljudimi)
house is build.IMPF.PPP.SG.F two months
«The building of the house lasted two months».
(24b) Kuća je/bila sagradena za dva mjeseca (*ljudimi)
house is/was build.PF.PPP.SG.F for two months
«The house was built in two months».
3. Reflexive constructionsIn Russian, the constructions with — n/-t are strongly related to aspect. As rightly stated by Poupynin [1990: 11], the periphrastic passive with an imperfective participle bears very specific aspectual meanings («aspectual particular meaning», [ibid: 131]), due to very specific conditions of syntactic order, lexicon and context. Being unable to convey the notion of process, which is specific to the passive reflexive, an utterance such as (25a) combines two semantic values according to the author [ibid.: 11—2]: that of experience («experiential action») and that of resultant state («resultant state»).
But the use of the reflexive perfective passive such as (25b), which is infrequent and often deemed familiar, is due to «its ability to express the so-called potential contextual meaning» of the perfective which is interpreted as a quality of the subject [Poupynin 1990: 11–12' 1996: 131]: