40 лет Санкт-Петербургской типологической школе

(13a) Pokój został pomałowany w zeszłym roku /*dva razy

room became paint.PF.PPP.SG.M in last year/ two times

«The room was painted last year».

(13b) *Pokój został małowany w zeszłym roku

room became paint.IMPF.PPP.SG.M in last year

(13c) Pokój bił pomałowany w zeszłym roku / dvarazy

room was paint.PF.PPP.SG.M in last year / two times

«The room was only painted last year» / «The room was painted last year twice».

(13d) Pokój bił małowany w zeszłym roku

room was paint.IMPF.PPP.SG.M in last year

«The room was painted last year».

Siewierska [1984: 129, 1988: 251] notes that recourse to (13c) implies that the room needs repainting, whereas (13a) does not. If one admits that the passive resultative state determines a property of the patient while at the same time implying a preceding event, and if one takes into account the meaning of zostać «to become», one easily understands that such inferences may be made. Zostać directly links the resultative state to the event serving to highlight the transitional character of the event and to state that the patient's property has been acquired prior to the act of speaking; the adverbial expression is therefore taken as included in the transitional event, which would explain why the periphrastic construction with zostać is incompatible with dva razy «two times», mnogo raz «many times», etc. On the other hand, the «be»-passive with a perfective verb gives priority to the resultative state by only referring to the implied event, leading to ambiguity as to whether the resultative state belongs to the patient (meaning a resultative state) or whether the resultative state only serves to hark back to the event at the origin of the patient's affectation. The adverbial phrase in (13a) is presented as incident to the event, which allows one to understand why iteration is permitted.

The contrast we have just evidenced between these two types of constructions clearly appears in the following two examples, in which the adverbial phrase denoting duration is only allowed in the «be» — passive:

Polish

(14a) Pies pzrez cała noc byl uwiązany na łańcuchu

dog through all night was attach.PF.PPP.SG.M on chain

«All night long the dog was (stayed) attached to a chain».

(14b) Pies zostal uwiązany na łańcuchu

dog became attach.PF.PPP.SG.M on chain

«The dog was attached to the chain».

(15a) Nieprzyjaciel jest pokonany

enemy is defeatPF.PPP.SG.M

«The enemy happens to be/is defeated».

(15b) Nieprzyjaciel został pokonany

enemy became defeatPF.PPP.SG.M

«The enemy was defeated» (lit. became defeated).

Let's go back to examples (13). The comparison between (13c) and (13d) reveals another meaning held by the «be» — passive. Only (13d) allows one to consider the situation as a statement about a general resultative state based upon a process which was simply accomplished in the past; it does not allow the iterative meaning possible in (13c). I shall come back to this point with examples taken from Bulgarian.

The classic Russian example dom postroen, which can be transposed into other Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Polish, Czech or Serbo-Croatian), will allow us to show how the distribution of the participial form is partly governed by the opposition between a stative situation and a dynamic situation and partly by the notion of completion, which is conveyed exclusively by the perfective form: