L’imperfettivo fattivo in russo e bielorusso: sei coppie di verbi telici a confronto

The article is devoted to the Slavic factual imperfective, in particular to a comparison between Russian and Belarusian in terms of aspectual choice in competing situations, i.e. in contexts in which a completed event can be conveyed by both a perfective verb and its imperfective counterpart. The study, aimed at discerning convergences and divergences between the two languages, was divided into two phases: the analysis in a parallel Russian-Belarusian corpus of six pairs of telic verbs, with the purpose of identifying possible discordances in the choice of aspect in Russian and Belarusian texts and their respective translations, and a test administered to native speakers of Russian and Belarusian, the results of which were subsequently subjected to statistical analysis. The corpus-based study made it possible to record a few aspectual discordances limited only to the verb to ask (sprašivat’-sprosit’ in Russian and pytac’/cca-spytac’/cca in Belarusian), on which our further analysis then focused. The study showed that the factual imperfective is used in a similar way in the two languages, although there seem to be a slight preference towards perfective in contemporary Russian. Furthermore, the results of the statistical model revealed that in both languages the imperfective is preferred in dialogic contexts, confirming that the phenomenon is typical of spoken language and therefore needs to be studied on the basis of suitable examples. Finally, as far as the verb to ask is concerned, data show that, with a linking verb function, the two aspectual marks appear to be completely synonymous and the preference for one of them could be diachronically-motivated.