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Exploring Emptiness
Laura Janda and Tore Nesset
In this project, which has received funding from Norges Forskningsråd, we investigate two classes of derivational affixes in Russian that have traditionally been considered "empty", i.e. devoid of semantic content:
- prefixes in so-called natural perfectives
- verbal suffixes, i.e. suffixes that are added to a root in order to create a verb
The perfectivizing prefixes na- and s- in verbs like napisat’ ‘write’ and sdelat’ ‘do’ have traditionally been considered to have no semantic content, except for the aspectual feature "perfective". This sets them apart from specialized perfectives like perepisat’ ‘rewrite’ where the prefix pere- adds the meaning "over again". Verbal suffixes like -a in napisat’ and -aj in sdelat’ (where final /j/ is sometimes deleted) are also considered semantically empty; there is no contrast in meaning between verbs with the -aj and -a suffixes. From the point of view of cognitive linguistics, "empty" affixes represent a challenge, insofar as cognitive linguistics emphasizes the importance of meaning as the driving force in grammar (Janda 2000:4). We therefore wish to explore the "empty" affixes from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.
The project has the following main objectives:
- explore what cognitive linguistics can contribute to our understanding of derivational morphology.
- contribute to the understanding of "empty" affixes in the derivational morphology of Russian verbs.
- contribute to the understanding of the Russian aspect system.
contribute to the understanding of the ongoing -a → -aj shift in Russian. - illustrate the value of corpus data for derivational morphology and cognitive linguistics.
- demonstrate how cognitive linguistic research can form the basis for internet-based teaching materials.
We entertain three main hypotheses:
- "Empty" affixes do indeed have semantic content; the illusion of semantic emptiness is due to a large amount of conceptual overlap (Langacker 1999) between the meaning of the stem and the affix.
- Verbs with "empty" affixes form radial categories (Lakoff 1987) organized around prototypes.
- The paradigm structures of verbs show prototype effects that influence the distribution of "empty" affixes.
See also this link to the Slavic cognitive Linguistics in Tromsø research group. The researchers involved in the project are Laura Janda, Tore Nesset, Olga Lyashevskaya and Svetlana Sokolova. Assistants are Anastasia Makarova and Anna Baydimirova. Wojciech Lewandowski was a visiting researcher from October 2008 to March 2009.
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