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

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

> . ot ¯ stuk ¯ ivat’, “to knock several times,
> insisting on each knock”
  In my Russian-Hungarian dictionary, <otstukivat'> is translated
as 'to tick out (e.g. a message on the telegraph), to pound out
(e.g. a letter on the typewriter)', as well as 'to beat the
rythm/time (e.g. when listening to a melody)'

> when “-yvat’ / -ivat’ mainly carries an idea of  iteration /
> repetition.
  It could be, but in the above case, its a simple "meaningless"
suffix to form the imperfective pair of the perfective verb
<otstukat'>. In Russian, perfective verbs have no present tense at
all, the present forms of <otstukat'> expresses a future action.
Thus, if you want to say <otstukat'> in presence, you have to use
its imperfective pair, namely <otstukivat'>.

> Russian, like German, do sometimes (e.g. “po ¯ raz! ¯ exat’sja” = to
> leave, one after the other, or familiar [pejorative] “po ¯ na ¯ vy ¯
> delyvat’ = to make”
  I don't know the deepest depth of Russian, I speak Slovak, but I
think that the latter is rather an ad hoc forming. As far as I know
in Russian -- but surely in Slovak -- only two-level verbal prefix
chain are "stable".

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