Factors contributing to prefixation of biaspectual verbs in Croatian

Abstract One of the distinctive features Slavic verbs is their aspectual morphology: typically each finite and non-finite form a verb has constant value: either perfective (PFV) or imperfective (IPFV). Nevertheless, in all languages, besides these prototypical with only one assigned value, there are also underspecified usually called biaspectual (BVs). As argued literature, on sentence level such have potential to express both values, PFV IPFV, without any further affixation. However, some scholars assert that intended value can rarely be unambiguously signaled. To resolve ambiguous native speakers often provide additional context signals derive new aspectually defined indicate value. The latter possibility been addressed numerous papers, but mainly goal detecting (most common) prefixes used this process. This study aimed examine patterns behind BV prefixation Croatian. In order detect factors statistically significant impact BVs Croatian, random stratified sample 237 Croatian (BVs origin borrowings) was compiled. data regarding existence derivatives were extracted from three different corpora contemporary subcorpus: National Corpus, Language Repository, Web Corpus its subcorpus Forum, afterwards analyzed using R software help lme4 package. results obtained generalized linear mixed model revealed five for which attributed lexical (semantical), morphological sociolinguistic domains.