ISSN: 2306-5737E-ISSN: 2658-4069
Acta Linguistica Petropolitana
Transactions of the Institute for Linguistic Studies
ISSN: 2306-5737E-ISSN: 2658-4069
Acta Linguistica Petropolitana
Transactions of the Institute for Linguistic Studies 

Towards a description of experiential contexts in the New Testament

DOI:10.30842/alp23065737193357391
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Kuznetsova Yu. N., Podgornaya A. D. K opisaniyu relevantnykh kontekstov dlya eksperiyentivnosti v Novom Zavete. Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. 357–391.

The Experiential occupies a peripheral position in the aspectual zone and indicates that X has participated in a given situation at least once during a certain period and has acquired certain qualities due to this experience. In this paper, we present a list of contexts with experiential meaning identified in five books of the New Testament (The Gospel of Matthew, The Gospel of Mark, The Gospel of Luke, The Gospel of John, and The Acts of the Holy Apostles) in eight languages (Ancient Greek, Latin, Spanish, English, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Udmurt). Particular attention was paid to the latter three languages, because Udmurt and Japanese use specialized encoding for this meaning, while Chinese has a marker covering not only experiential, but also existential contexts. The latter exclude the component of characterisation and thus adhere to the category of the Existential, whereas the other languages in the sample use other grammatical means (the perfect in European languages or the imperfective aspect in Russian). Additional translations were examined for Chinese and English due to the frequent periphrases in the Chinese translation and the peculiarities of the usage of the Perfect in the King James Bible. Preselected contexts were ranked on the basis of how many languages encoded the experiential meaning with the expected means. As a result, 59 contexts were identified and grouped according to their prototypicality into nuclear, typical, peripheral, and marginal contexts. Whereas the Chinese marker (51 uses overall) appears sporadically in marginal contexts, some of which could be categorised as existential, there are no instances of a Japanese experiential construction (29 contexts) in this group. At the same time, the use of the specialized means in Udmurt (10 contexts) is limited to only nuclear and typical contexts. Other languages, except for Ancient Greek and Udmurt, code the majority of the selected contexts with the expected means. We developed a classification of contexts according to a set of typologically relevant morphological, syntactic and semantic parameters that include: sentence polarity, adverbial support, relevance of the experience for the speech time, animacy and the semantic role of the subject of experience, and multiplicity of experience. The results of our research can be useful for further typological and language-specific studies of the experiential aspect.

Keywords
experiential aspect, parallel corpora, Chinese, Japanese, Udmurt, Russian, English, Spanish, Latin, Ancient Greek
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Keywords
experiential aspect, parallel corpora, Chinese, Japanese, Udmurt, Russian, English, Spanish, Latin, Ancient Greek
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