Basic Characteristics and Aspectual Properties of Croatian ObjExp Verbs

Abstract

This paper discusses the basic characteristics of ObjExp verbs in Croatian (thematic roles, argument structure, anticausative variant, aspect of the verb), with special attention paid to the aspectual properties of such verbs. According to various authors (Arad 1998, Pylkkänen 2000, Biały 2005, Grafmiller 2013), ObjExp verbs are not a unified aspectual class since they can be interpreted as both stative and non-stative verbs. Five diagnostics that differentiate between stative and non-stative interpretation are applied to a sample of 40 verbs: (1) passive formation; (2) use in the punctual past tense; (3) co-occurrence with agent-oriented adverbs; (4) use of a verb in the imperative mood; and (5) the ability of the verb to be used as a complement of control verbs (Grafmiller 2013). The results of this research show that all Croatian ObjExp verbs with primary psychological meaning have an anticausative variant derived by reflexive morphology, that most verbs have two (or three) interpretations, and that perfective ObjExp verbs can probably be more easily interpreted as non-stative than imperfective ones.