Once more on the verbal aspect and linguistic politeness in the Slavonic imperative: A parallel with Greek

Abstract

In the present paper the results from previous research on aspect in the imperative, done first for Russian and subsequently for the remaining Slavonic languages, are applied to another, non Slavonic language that also expresses the category of verbal aspect with morphological means, ie. modern Greek. It is confirmed that in imperative forms the verbal aspect may have pragmatical implications as regards preserving or cancelling distance and, more generally speaking, as regards (im-) politeness. That is, in Greek, similar to what was observed in some Slavonic languages (i.e. Serbian and Czech, but not in Russian) requests for actions that are expressed with the perfective aspect (ie. with aorist stem) are more neutral, “correct”, formal, while those expressed with the imperfective (ie. with the present stem) are more informal, direct and therefore potentially impolite. The latter can be used at most in informal contexts in which the imperative, directed at a person, is expressed by means of the allocutive pronoun of the second person singular.

Keywords

• verbal aspect
• imperative
• politeness
• Russian
• Serbian
• Czech
• Greek