This book focuses on some of the most puzzling case marking patterns in the Slavic languages and ties this pattern to different types of aspectual phenomena. It demonstrates that the accusative versus lexical case marking contrast on an internal argument with two-place verbs is directly linked to whether the lexical/semantic aspect of a so-called ‘base’ verb is compositional or not. It also shows that the instrumental versus case agreement dichotomy on a predicate in depictive, participle, and copular constructions in the East Slavic languages is linked to a grammatical aspect contrast, namely ... More

This book focuses on some of the most puzzling case marking patterns in the Slavic languages and ties this pattern to different types of aspectual phenomena. It demonstrates that the accusative versus lexical case marking contrast on an internal argument with two-place verbs is directly linked to whether the lexical/semantic aspect of a so-called ‘base’ verb is compositional or not. It also shows that the instrumental versus case agreement dichotomy on a predicate in depictive, participle, and copular constructions in the East Slavic languages is linked to a grammatical aspect contrast, namely to whether the eventuality denoted by a predicate is bounded or unbounded in time.