Negative-mutational verbs and presupposition in Czech

0522014 - ÚJČ 2020 RIV CZ eng J - Journal Article
Veselý, Luboš - Veselý, Vojtěch
Negative-mutational verbs and presupposition in Czech.
Slovo a slovesnost. Roč. 80, č. 4 (2019), s. 265-284. ISSN 0037-7031
R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GA16-19561S
Institutional support: RVO:68378092
Keywords : mutational verb * presupposition * negation * implicative verb
OECD category: Linguistics
Impact factor: 0.200, year: 2019
Method of publishing: Limited access
http://sas.ujc.cas.cz

The aim of the contribution is to analyze the meaning of the Czech verbs zůstat ‘stay, remain’, nechat ‘keep, leave, let’ and zapomenout ‘forget’. The authors argue they are mutational verbs sui generis: their positive forms express a denial that a mutational action has been carried out, whereas the negative forms express the carrying out of a mutation. Since such behaviour is contrary to prototypically mutational verbs, zůstat, nechat and zapomenout are interpreted as negative-mutational verbs. This construal makes it possible to maintain the assumption that a presupposition of an initial situation is a sufficient condition for the mutational meaning. If combined with an infinitive complement, the verbs zůstat, nechat, zapomenout belong to the class of implicative verbs (zapomenout is negative-implicative). In this use, the given verbs retain the status of negative-mutational verbs provided certain conditions imposed on the infinitive are fulfilled.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0306585