Actionality across (sub)paradigms

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores the verbal system of Tundra Nenets and offers a partition of the entire set of derivationally minimal verbs into actional classes, which include stative, process, inceptive-stative, ingressive-atelic, durative and punctual telic, durative and punctual ingressive, and bi-telic verbs. This classification is established in a bottom-up manner, starting from the lowest level of actional interpretations of individual subparadigms of a verb. As a result, 18 subparadigmatic classes are established. At the next stage, an actional characteristic is assigned to the entire paradigm and the 18 subparadigmatic classes are reduced to seven actional macroclasses. However, at the paradigmatic level, one discovers that for certain types of verbs actional information available paradigm-internally does not suffice. To recover the missing information, one needs to examine derivationally related lexical items that realize semantic configurations unavailable paradigm-internally. This paradigm-external perspective leads to the recognition of cross-paradigmatic actional characteristics assigned to groups of derivationally related verbs.