40 лет Санкт-Петербургской типологической школе

(18) Ništo za otbeljazvane, osven ednapodrobnost, kojato săšto ne e osobeno ljubopitna: sleden săm. Ne tvărde

follow.IMPF.PPP.SG.M am

nastojčivo i ne osobeno grubo, no săm sleden (B. Rajnov).

am follow.IMPF.PPP.SG.M

«Nothing to report except one detail which is not particularly strange: I'm being followed. Not really regularly, nor brutally, but I'm being followed».

(19) A xlabăt beše pečen <…> po star whereas bread.the was cook.IMPF.PPP.SG.M according old bălgarski običaj

Bulgarian tradition

«Whereas the bread was baked <…> following some old Bulgarian tradition».

(20) Toj znaeše, če osemdeset dekaraniv <…> bjaxa

he knew that eighty acres fields were

kupuvani obsto, no slučajno v prodavatelnija

buy.IMPF.PPP.PL in.common but by.chance in of.sale

akt bjaxa pisani samo na imeto na Valčana.

act were write.IMPF.PPP.PL only at name.the of Valchana

«He knew that eighty acres of field <…> had been bought in common, but that, by pure chance, in the sale document, they had been registered under the sole name of Valchan».

With some merely interrupted processes, the construction becomes compatible with adverbs such as mnogo păti «many times» or često «often». The adverbial form is thus incidental to the event and leads to an iterative interpretation. In other words, in the iterative sense, the event is presented as an open class of events in which neither a first nor a last occurrence may be isolated and the resultative state refers to the general result of all these occurrences.

Going back to example (17c), the participle is derived from a secondary imperfective verbal base, and such forms demand an iterative context; the construction thereby denotes a resultative state which originates from an event presented as a closed class of events which has a first and a last occurrence, even though their number is not always specified.

Due to the verb prefix, each event included in the series is analysed as a completed process. The following two examples make apparent the opposition between this meaning (17a) and that of a resultative state (17b):

(21a) <…> ot dva i polovina veka knjažeskijat dom be

of two and half century of.prince.the house was

opožarjavan mnogo păăti

burn.IMPF.PPP.SG.M several times

«<…> over two and a half centuries the princely residence has been set on fire several times».

(21b) <…> knjažeskijat dom be opožaren predi dva i

of.prince.the house was bum.PF.PPP.PL before two and

polovina veka *mnogo păti

half century several times

«<…> two and a half centuries ago the princely residence was set on fire».

The other Slavic languages have apparently not developped such a mechanism. Yu. Maslov [1988: 79] points out a few scarce examples such as the following in Polish which does not seem to belong to a paradigm as do those in Bulgarian:

(22) Wqgiel jest wydobywa-n-y

coal is mine.IMPF-PPP-SG.M

«Coal is (being) mined»

Descriptions of Serbo-Croatian show the first two variations pointed out for Bulgarian: (23a) and (24a) refer to the resultative state of an accomplished and completed process; (23b) and (24b) refer to the resultative state of processes which is a simply accomplished, apparently barring iteration: