Re: Russian verbal forms (was: (In)transitive verbs

On Sun, 8 Feb 2004  Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...> wrote:

> My wife confirms, you can say : Chto ty ponavydelyval
> ? or Chto ty ponavydumyval ? as familiar forms. The
> author says that such forms (3 prefixes) are seldom
> used, and only in spoken language.
  As far I know, in case of <ponevydelyvat'> even its base
<vydelyvat'> is familiar. Or, to be precise, it's familiar in the
meaning 'to make, to do' (its "original" non-familiar meaning is:
'to manufacture, to process').

  I think it possible that <vydelyvat'> -- only in its familiar
meaning -- in the spoken language isn't considered as a prefixed
verb at all, but it's lexicalized in the background as an
indivisible lexeme, an alternation of its non-prefixed (non-
familiar) synonym <delat'>. I suppose it can be the reason why this
word can take two additional verbal prefixes, and this analysis
probably can explain also why only a limited subset of words can
have more than two prefixes.  However, there's another possible
solution: the colloquial <pona-> is not a prefix chain but a single
prefix.

  Both solutions have Slovak parallelisms: verbs like <navs<tívit'>
'to visit' are not considered as compound, i.e. you can divide them
only on syllable boundaries -- <nav-s<tívit'> -- but not on the
etymological morpheme boundaries -- *<na-vs<tívit'>.

  In addition, there's a verbal prefix <vz-> in Slovak. It behave
like an indivisible morpheme, but orginally it's a compound of
prefixes <v-> and <z->.

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Notation "s<" stands for letter "s" with caron.

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