Skoplev A. The problem of retaining the category of aspect by Czech action nominals ending in -ní/-tí.

Object: Czech nouns ending in -ní/-tí with action semantics motivated by verbs. Objective: determining the degree of consistency with which the Czech verbal noun in -ní/-tí retains the grammatical category of aspect of the original verb stem. Methods: distributional and transformational as well as of contextual analysis, continuous sampling, and quantitative calculations. Scientific novelty: the study provides a systematic, methodologically substantiated analysis of the aspectual correlation of Czech nominals ending in -ní/-tí; the research on the aspectual opposition of the verbal noun forms was based on a multibillion-entry corpus of Czech texts; the problem consideration was not limited to the formal reflection of the paired aspectual opposition inherent in verbs but was extended to the context of solving a wide range of questions concerning the functioning of the verbal nouns in the Czech language; the aspect semantics of the substantives were studied with their further classification according to the degree of deviating from the original concept of ‘action-process’; the research concerned the question of the lexical identity of correlative verbal nouns like rozlévání (spilling) – rozlití (spill), motivated by aspectually opposed polysemantic verbs; the potential of the action substantives in -ní/-tí to express the category of aspect was studied in the context of similar investigations of other verb-noun hybrids and, in particular, taking into account the fact of the lexicogrammatical heterogeneity of such ‘intermediate’ classes of words. Practical value: the possibility to use the research statements, material, and findings when devising academic courses and compiling textbooks on the Czech language morphology / grammar or general problems of Slavic aspectology.