French Inchoative Verbs commencer, s’apprêter, se mettre à and Terminative Verbs finir, cesser Combined with Infinitive in Slovene Translation – a Missed Possibility for Lexical Exploration?

Abstract

Aspect is realized in different way in different languages and can be expressed by grammatical as well as lexical means. Verbal inchoative and terminative paraphrases introduced with French ingressive verbs commencer, s’apprêter à, se mettre à + infinitive, and egressive verbs cesser, finir + infinitive have an equivalent phasal form in Slovene, namely začeti + infinitif and nehati + infinitive. Slovene, a Slavic language can mark the phasal aspect with verbal prefixes.

The paper compares ingressive verbal paraphrases commencer, se mettre à, s’apprêter à and egressive verbs finir, cesser de, followed by an infinitive, with their translations into Slovene taken from the FraSloK bilingual corpus, which is a part of the Spook corpus. An analysis of the translations of these verbal paraphrases into Slovene shows that it is possible to find not only solutions that are structurally equivalent to ingressive verb začeti + infinitive or egressive verbs nehati + infinitive or končati + noun, but also those that are translated by means of verbal prefixes or adverbs. In the translations analysed, however,  realizations with incohative or terminative periphrastic constructions prevail.