Towards a semantic model for conjunctions of 'since' and its interaction with verbal aspect : Polish material

This study is part of the ongoing project of the research group Comparative Slavic Verbal Aspect at the University of Amsterdam into taxis relationships based on the meanings expressed by Dutch sinds, English since and their counterparts in Slavic languages. Initial searches in the ASPAC parallel corpus yielded a number of translation equivalents and further research on the basis of Polish monolingual corpora is being done in order to shed light on the functioning of Polish temporal conjunctions. In complex sentences the verbal aspect of Slavic languages as well as the tenses interplay with the meaning of conjunctions in ordering paired events on the temporal axis, special attention is therefore given to the choice between perfective and imperfective aspect and tense forms in both main and subordinate clauses. The role of terminativity also needs to be scrutinized. Here I will set out some of the issues and problems to be tackled by this research.