The actual world is abnormal: on the semantics of the bylo construction in Russian
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The actual world is abnormal: on the semantics of the bylo construction in Russian
Olga Kagan
Published online: 27 September 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract This paper investigates the interpretation of the modal particle bylo in Modern Russian. On the intuitive level, sentences in which this particle appears report events that do not proceed normally and fail to receive an expected continuation. For instance, the particle is appropriate in a context whereby an eventuality begins but fails to reach completion, is intended but fails to be realized, or reaches completion, but its result is annulled. The paper proposes an intensional analysis of the particle, making use of the notion of inertia worlds, worlds in which events are not interrupted and reach their normal completion (Dowty, Word and meaning in Montague grammar, 1979). The particle signals that an event that takes place in the actual world is followed by an eventuality of a certain type in all of the corresponding inertia worlds but not in reality. The bylo construction is further compared to the progressive aspect, which has been argued to involve a statement about inertia worlds. It is shown that the two phenomena describe eventualities from different perspectives but are unified by their intensional flavor, as well as by pointing to a distinction between the actual world and the inertia ones. Keywords Aspect Intensionality Modality Possible worlds Progressive Slavic linguistics
1 Introduction The progressive in English is a grammatical aspect that has been assigned an intensional account. As is well known, a past progressive sentence with an
O. Kagan (&) Department of Foreign Literature & Linguistics, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O. Box 653, 84105 Beer Sheva, Israel e-mail: [email protected]
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accomplishment event predicate like (1) does not entail its past simple counterpart (2). This pattern has been referred to as The Imperfective Paradox. (1) (2)
John was building a house. John built a house.
(1) does not entail that the building event reached its natural endpoint and, thus, that the house actually came into existence. At the same time, there is a clear intuition that if (1) is true, and if the building event proceeds normally, without interruptions, then eventually the proposition John built a house would become true as well. This intuition has been captured under the intensional analysis of the progressive, originally proposed by Dowty (1979). According to this analysis, (1) entails that the building event reaches its natural endpoint in inertia worlds, which are normal in the sense that in these worlds, events proceed without interruption and reach their normal completion. The actual world need not belong to the set of inertia worlds and, therefore, in reality, the building event need not be completed. Other researchers, e.g. Portner (1994, 1998), Landman (1992, 2008), Zucchi (1999) formulate intensional analyses of the progressive aspect that differ, some of them quite considera
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