Deadjectival Verbs in Slavic : The AAB Pattern and Its Implications

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Authors

CAHA Pavel

Year of publication 2025
Type Requested lectures
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

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Description This paper considers patterns of stem allomorphy in Slavic. Specifically, it focuses on adjectives whose positive stem includes the ‘augment’ k, such as the Czech slad-k-ý ‘sweet.’ When we look at the comparative or causatives of such adjectives, the stem marker -k is either present or absent in the relevant form. In Czech, it seems that whenever the marker is absent in the comparative, it is also absent in the verb and vice versa. Following Bobaljik (2012), these can be called an AAA pattern (all forms have the augment) or ABB pattern (only the positive has the augment), Contrasting with this, Bulgarian overwhelmingly shows the AAB pattern. The goal of this talk is to explore the issues that the newly discovered AAB patterns raise for the theoretical accounts of *ABA, focussing specifically on the question whether (and if so, then how) the difference between Czech and Bulgarian can be related to the fact that BG has prefixal/periphrastic comparative, while Czech has a synthetic/suffixal comparative.
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