Orphan Prefixes and the Grammaticalization of Aspect in South Slavic

Abstract

This paper establishes the term ORPHAN PREFIX for a Slavic prefix that no longer\nshares a dominant spatial meaning with its cognate preposition. Most Slavic prefixes\ndo share such a dominant spatial meaning with their cognate prepositions,\ncf., e.g., the Russian prefix v- and preposition v, both meaning ‘into.’ Orphan prefixes\nappear to be an important component of many Slavic aspectual systems.\nHowever, in most Slavic languages there is at most one prefix that has lost the\nsemantic connection to its cognate preposition and come to function primarily as a\ngrammatical marker of perfectivity. Only three Slavic prefixes are in fact to be\nconsidered orphan prefixes, and each only in some Slavic languages. A first case\nis Bulgarian iz- ‘out,’ as its cognate preposition iz is no longer used in the spatial\nmeaning ‘out of.’ The most extreme case is Bulgarian po-, which no longer shares\nthe spatial meaning of SURFACE CONTACT with the preposition po to any significant\ndegree. Another important case is the hybrid prefix s-/z- in Slovene, which\narose due to the phonetic coalescence of sъ- ‘together, down from’ and jьz- ‘out’\nafter the fall of the jers and which as a perfectivizing prefix has lost its semantic\nconnection to sъ ‘with, down from’ and iz ‘out of’ to varying degrees in Slovene.\nThis paper presents an overview of perfectivizing prefixation in three South Slavic\nlanguages, Bulgarian, Croatian and Slovene. It is argued that though the loss of\na dominant spatial meaning is necessary for a given prefix to be grammaticalized\nas a purely perfectivizing prefix in an individual Slavic language, this process is\nneither predictable nor necessary for the maintenance of a Slavic-style aspect system\n(cf. standard Croatian, where no orphan prefix exists and no such\ngrammaticalization has taken place). Building on this line of thinking, the paper\nargues that the facts from South Slavic support recent views on grammaticalization,\nthat there is no “grammaticalization” process per se, only semantic changes\nthat lead to grammaticalization as an epiphenomenal result.

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