Badania aspektu w językach polskim, czeskim i rosyjskim za pomocą korpusów i baz danych (pierwsze podsumowanie tematu)

The article is connected to the project “DiAsPol250” in which Polish is compared to Czech and Russian from the perspective of the evolution of their aspect systems (http://www.diaspol.uw.edu.pl/). We make use of existing synchronic and diachronic electronic corpora and are building a corpus of our own with annotated aspect pairs; we also create a database of aspect triplets whose role we consider as particularly important for the system. We want to assess which changes have occurred since the mid-18th century in prefixing and suffixing strategies of verb stems, both in general and by comparing particular prefixes and suffixes, especially so-called natural (vs. specialized) prefixes (according to Janda et al., 2013). The article supplies a sketch of the general premises of the project, and it summarizes our experience with existing large corpora and databases which we have been employing. We also present a case study in order to demonstrate a procedure designed to compare the distribution of the Czech prefix z- in triplets and in the corpus. This procedure is meant to check more general tendencies; it also illustrates why electronic corpora cannot be replaced in research on distributional properties and why their role does not consist simply in providing examples for the illustration of hypotheses.