Monday, 11 March, 2019 - 13:30
Room: 

NU-verbs in Czech and Polish (joint work with Bartosz Wiland)

There are two types of verbs with the thematic suffix NU in Czech and Polish: so-called degree achievement verbs (hloup-nou-t ‘to get stupid’) and semelfactives (kop-nou-t ’to kick (once)’). The syncretism between degree achievements and semelfactives is not specific to these two languages, but building on the  morphological and syntactic evidence from Czech and Polish we argue that semelfactives are (syntactically) bigger than degree achievements. Syncretism, in this view, is a hallmark of a containment relationship: one category is a subset of another (Bobaljik 2012).