Space-time asymmetries: Russian v ‘in(to)’ and the North Slavic Temporal Adverbial Continuum

• DOI: 10.1007/s11185-013-9115-9
• Publication Date: 2013-09-26T14:34:24Z
• Authors: Anastasia Makarova; Tore Nesset
• Keywords: Adverbial; Markedness

This article presents a corpus-based investigation of temporal adverbials with special focus on Russian v ‘in(to)’ and its cognates in North Slavic (Belarusian, Ukrainian, Polish and Czech). We advance the Constraint Hypothesis, according to which case government is more restricted in the domain of time than in the domain of space. This hypothesis receives support from the five languages under scrutiny insofar as the distribution of the accusative vs. locative after v and its cognates is contrastive in the domain of space, but complementary in temporal adverbials. On this basis, we argue that the relationship between space and time is asymmetrical. Although all five languages display space-time asymmetries, we show that they have different systems of temporal adverbials, including a number of constructions with prepositions or bare cases. In order to capture the differences we propose a North Slavic Temporal Adverbial Continuum, which is corroborated by a thorough statistical investigation of data from the ParaSol corpus.