HOW TO DESCRIBE THE POLISH VERBAL PREFIX (Quelle description pour le preverbe polonais ?)

In this paper, the authoress tries to provide the semantic description for Polish verbal prefix. She is particularly interested in the prepositional 'history' of this operator and the way the diachronic relation contributes to aspectuality. She uses topological and quasi-topological operators for description of spatiality, temporality and activities encoded by preposition and verbal prefix. The topological intervals serve to represent basic aspectual situations : state, process and event. These aspects are regarded as a property of the whole predicative relation understood as an application (in the formal sense) of a predicate to its arguments. Moreover, she claims that in the binary predicative relation, P2T2T1, the compositionality between verbal prefix and the second argument T2 is of aspectual relevance. It follows that aspect encoded by prefixation does not focus on the verb only, but it can determine a spatial place or an object. The authoress argues that in the majority of the cases, verbal prefix encodes an achievement understood as a closure of the right boundary of the process associated with the predicate, which coincides with the focus on some topological zone. Achievement is understood qualitatively and does not always implies the 'completion' of action, but according to the meaning of the verbal prefix, it can indicate 'achievement of the beginning', 'achievement of the end phase', etc