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date: 21 October 2019

Abstract and Keywords

This article examines the grammaticalisation developments in Slavic languages. The functions of the past tenses lost in northern Slavic are only partially covered by the younger opposition of perfective and imperfective aspect. The only new classes of morphemes that arose in some sub-areas of Slavic are the definite and the indefinite article, both with preliminary, not-yet-grammaticalised stages in some more Slavic varieties. In sum, in Slavic grammaticalization, phenomena have occurred predominantly in the realm of verbal categories; only very few phenomena are related to the noun phrase.

Keywords: Slavic languages, grammaticalisation, past tenses, morphemes, article, verbal categories, noun phrase

Björn Wiemer

Björn Wiemer studied Slavic and general linguistics in Hamburg and Leningrad (MA 1992, Hamburg). Before his PhD (1996, Hamburg) he was a postgraduate student for two years in Warsaw. From 1996 to 2007, he was Chair of Slavic Languages at the University of Constace (Germany), where he finished his post-doctoral thesis in 2002. Since 2007, he has been Professor at the Institute of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz. His particular interest in grammaticalization developed during his work in Constance. Further research fields include aspectology, evidentiality, modality, lanugage contact, areal linguistics, diachronic semantics, and discourse pragmatics.

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