Laura A. Janda holds a PhD in Slavic Linguistics from UCLA (1984) and is currently professor of Russian in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. She pursues research in the framework of cognitive linguistics applied mostly to the analysis of grammatical categories and constructions in Russian using corpus data. Janda also works on the development of research-based electronic resources for learners of Russian.
Verb Classifiers – Not So Exotic After All? The Case of Russian
In some languages numeral classifiers classify nouns, but the phenomenon of verb classifiers has been largely restricted to “exotic” languages of Australia and Asia. I present a detailed typological analysis showing that verb classifiers are prevalent also in Russian and indeed the entire family of Slavic languages. The grammatical function of numeral classifiers is to form and classify units for the referents of nouns, and I argue that Slavic aspectual prefixes have the function of forming and classifying units for the referents of verbs. Numeral classifiers typically classify discrete objects, whereas Slavic aspectual prefixes classify discrete events. This comparison is anchored in a variety of ways, taking into account distributional and semantic evidence, and the effects of construal, foregrounding, definiteness, and transnumerality. I argue that Slavic aspectual prefixes and numeral classifiers should be considered to be verbal and nominal instantiations of a general category of lexico-grammatical unitizers.
