Using event structures to model symmetric and asymmetric verb meanings in Croatian aspectual pairs

Croatian aspectual verb pairs allow to express «the different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation» (Comrie 1976: 3) by choosing between two morphologically related lexical variants: a perfective and an imperfective one (Babić 2002: 516–531; Barić et al. 1995; Browne 1993: 331–332; Kordić 1997: 41; Matovac 2022: 225–231; Silić & Pranjković 2007). However, not all verb meanings displayed by one variant are always available to the other – not even in the most derivationally prototypical of pairs. Pairs lacking one or more meanings that are present in the sense inventory of their aspectual counterpart are called asymmetrical aspectual pairs (Polančec 2022: 127–129) and their asymmetry is believed to be caused by constraints posed by the Aktionsartof the meanings involved (Kolaković 2018: 95; Polančec 2020: 160). Based on a small selection of corpus-extracted (hrWaC corpus, Ljubešić & Klubička 2014) and made-up examples, a comparison will be carried out between the meaning inventories of a selection of symmetric and asymmetric verb pairs available in the CroaTPAS resource (Marini & Ježek 2019; Marini 2022a). Their Aktionsartenwill be modelled using a customized version of the formalism of event structures (Pustejovsky 1991) to shed more light on the interaction between lexical and grammatical aspect in Croatian.