This dissertation examines the interplay of Situation Aspect and Viewpoint Aspect in two classes of constructions in Polish: i) anticausatives with and without Dative subjects, ex. (Jankowi) złamały się okulary John broke the glasses involuntarily / The glasses broke; and ii) Factual Imperfectives, ex. Jadłam obiad I have eaten my dinner. With the first type of construction, the concern is why the unintentional causer reading is obtainable only in telic contexts and how two classes of Polish anticausatives – one with prefixed verbs and one with unprefixed verbs – differ structurally. The question that arises with analyses of Factual Imperfective constructions (FIs) is about the untypical role of imperfective aspect: how is it possible that the imperfective morphemes that the Slavic literature (almost) unanimously pairs with English Progressives do not neutralize telicity as the Progressive does? The dissertation finds evidence supporting the view that Slavic lexical prefixes are telicity markers and secondary predicates (cf. Svenonius 2004, Žaucer 2009). It argues that imperfectives that lack any aspectual morpheme and have the accusative case assigned to a direct object, nonetheless possess a non-overt aspectual operator located in the domain of Viewpoint Aspect. The dissertation enriches the recent discussions concerned with the puzzle of how to account for various readings of the imperfective (Cipria & Roberts 2000, Hacquard 2006, Deo 2009) by providing a semantic analysis of an interpretation not attested in languages like French, Italian and Spanish on which the discussions have focused so far. I argue that the Russian and Polish patterns dubbed as Existential Factual Imperfectives (cf. Grønn 2003) carry a silent Epistemic Modal that selects the imperfective due to its right semantic type: <s,t> in contrast to the <t> type of the perfective. From a cross-linguistic perspective, this study is relevant for syntactic and semantic theories of aspect in natural language especially for the theory of imperfectivity. From a language specific perspective, this study aims to provide a deeper understanding of the particular aspect-related conditions that play a role in licensing oblique (Dative) causers in Polish.

The research presented in this dissertation adopts an empirical Saussurean structuralist approach to elucidating the true meaning of the verb patterns characterised formally by vowel lengthening in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The verbal system as a whole is examined in order to place the patterns of interest (III and VI) in context, the complexities of Arabic verbal morphology are explored and the challenges revealed by previous attempts to draw links between form and meaning are presented. An exhaustive dictionary survey is employed to provide quantifiable data to empirically test the largely accepted view that the vowel lengthening patterns have mutual/reciprocal meaning. Finding the traditional explanation inadequate and prone to too many exceptions, alternative commonalities of meaning are similarly investigated. Whilst confirming the detransitivising function of the ta- prefix which derives pattern VI from pattern III, analysis of valency data also precludes transitivity as a viable explanation for pattern III meaning compared with the base form. Examination of formally similar morphology in certain nouns leads to the intuitive possibility that vowel lengthening has aspectual meaning. A model of linguistic aspect is investigated for its applicability to MSA and used to isolate the aspectual feature common to the majority of pattern III and pattern VI verbs, which is determined to be atelicity. A set of verbs which appear to be exceptional in that they are not attributable to atelic aspectual categories is found to be characterised by inceptive meaning and a three-phase model of event time structure is developed to include an inceptive verbal category, demonstrating that these verbs too are atelic. Thus the form-meaning relationship which is discovered is that the vowel lengthening verbal patterns in Modern Standard Arabic have atelic aspectual meaning.

Prefix ex- u latinských sloves a jeho aspektová funkce Latin Verbal Prefix ex- in Regard of Aspect - disertační práce - Mgr. Martina Vaníková Summary The proposed thesis titled Latin Verbal Prefix ex- in Regard of Aspect is a pilot study that deals with the ways of expressing aspect in Latin, which is based on the detailed analysis of the functions of the verbal prefix ex- as one of the important components of this category. It also tries to find the method for the future research on the matter. In the theoretical part of the thesis the author gives summary of existing theories on aspect in general, with special attention given to the theories on aspect in the Czech and Latin language. The author defines the terms "aspect", "Aktionsart" and "situation type" at great length, and she particularly sets light to the term "telicity", distinguishing the "inherent telicity" from "maximizing". The practical part consist of: 1. a detailed analysis of all the occurrences of the indicative imperfect of the verbs with the prefix ex- from the corpus, which comprises of all well-preserved Latin texts from Plautus to Cicero; 2. an analysis of the indicative future and present tense forms of the selected verbs with the prefix ex-. Based on the analysis of the imperfect, the author verifies her hypothesis that the prefix...