Unbounded Telic Situations in English Language and Their Translation Equivalents in Serbian

Abstract

This paper presents a brief contrastive study of Serbian translation equivalents of telic situations (accomplishments and achievements) used in imperfective verbal aspect in English language. The aim is to examine to what extent the differences in the use of imperfective verbal aspect between these two languages allow retention of distinctive semantic feature [+ telicity] and the language manner to acheve this. Moreover, we shall analyze how the imperfective aspect affects the semantic feature [+/- duration], which distinguishes accomplishments from achievements. The corpus of this research is the novel A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and its translation to Serbian (Paklena pomorandža). Corpus analysis is synchronous contrastive analysis of telic situations used in Past Progressive, Present Progressive and Present Perfect Progressive (the total of 100 sentences) and their translation equivalents in Serbian.