Biaspectual & defective

Lesson opening

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Biaspectual and defective verbs: where the usual pattern does not apply

A Serbian verb usually lives in a pair, such as pisati and napisati, otvarati and otvoriti: one imperfective, one perfective. The lessons “The concept of aspect” and “Aspect pair formation” showed how such pairs work. Some verbs do not fit this pattern, and you have met them already without noticing.

There are three groups of them, and no rule predicts their members: you have to know them by sight.

The main biaspectual verbs: videti, čuti, ručati

The ones you will meet most are the verbs of seeing and hearing and the verbs of meals. Learn them by heart: you hear them every day. English see works in a similar way, covering a state (“I can see it”) and a moment (“I saw him”).

The gain: there is no second form to memorise, and the verb stays the same in every tense, while the rest of the sentence shows the aspect. After kad “when”, čim “as soon as” and ako “if”, talking about the future, it stands where a verb from a pair would use its perfective: kad ručam works like kad završim “when I finish” (lesson “Aspect with future & modals”). The price: without context you cannot tell the aspect. Compare the past, the future and the imperative:

Loanwords: the main source of biaspectual verbs

Most biaspectual verbs are borrowed verbs with the suffixes -ovati, -isati and -irati. A foreign word came into the language without a Slavic partner, and it serves both aspects at once.

One caveat, or the rule becomes a trap: what makes a verb biaspectual is not the suffix but the borrowed stem. Native verbs in -ovati and -isati are ordinary imperfectives: kupovati “to buy” has the partner kupiti, verovati “to believe” has poverovati, radovati se “to be glad” has obradovati se, and putovati “to travel” and mirisati “to smell (of)” are imperfective too.

How to tell the aspect in a given sentence

With one form, you recognise the aspect by the words around it. The clues are simple and almost never fail:

Cheat sheet

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Biaspectual and defective verbs

Biaspectual (dvovidski): one form for both aspects, no partner. Defective (nepotpun, defektivan): some forms are missing and are borrowed from another verb. No partner: all forms, but imperfective only.

Biaspectual verbs: who they are

Telling the aspect from the context

Neighbouring verbs that sharpen the meaning

• videti → duration: gledati “watch”, viđati se “meet now and then”; moment: ugledati, spaziti, primetiti “spot, notice”.
• čuti → slušati “listen”; začuti “catch a sound”; čuti se “talk on the phone” is biaspectual too.
• ručati → rare ručavati; loans → colloquial iskopirati, prokomentarisati.

Defective verbs