# All Slavic languages: aspect with "several times"



## jazyk

Here's a sentence from Žert/The Joke, by Milan Kundera, which caught my attention: Navštívil jsem několikrát politruka útvaru. (I visited/saw the army unit's politruk several times.) Navštívil is the past perfective of navštívit (to visit). The past imperfective is navštěvoval, from navštěvovat.

I feel that in many/most Slavic languages the imperfective aspect would have been used instead because of_ several times,_ which shows repetition, and that is one of the uses of the imperfective, but I'd like a confirmation from you guys. I'd also appreciate it if you could translate this sentence.

Thank you all very much.


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## Natabka

jazyk said:


> I feel that in many/most Slavic languages the imperfective aspect would have been used instead because of_ several times,_ which shows repetition, and that is one of the uses of the imperfective, but I'd like a confirmation from you guys.



Well, I wouldn't say that, Jazyk. In fact, in Ukrainian I would have used exactly the "past perfective _navštívil_" - Я _навістив_ його декілька разів. (Sorry, can't translate the whole sentence). It will mean that I did it when I was there, at that time and not the procedure of going to him several times but rather the fact of my being there is stressed and "several times" only plays the attributive role, I dare say, not the time marking.


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## TriglavNationalPark

It's the same in Slovenian: "Nekajkrat sem *obiskal* političnega komisarja vojaške enote."

Literally: [several times] [I visited (perfective)] [the political commissar] [of the military unit]

However, if "nekajkrat" ("several times") wasn't there, the imperfective ("obiskoval") would be used instead. Having both -- in other words, a "nekajkrat"/"obiskoval" combination -- would be unusual, because it would imply several separate *periods* of frequent visits, at least to my non-linguist ears.


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## Athaulf

jazyk said:


> Here's a sentence from Žert/The Joke, by Milan Kundera, which caught my attention: Navštívil jsem několikrát politruka útvaru. (I visited/saw the army unit's politruk several times.) Navštívil is the past perfective of navštívit (to visit). The past imperfective is navštěvoval, from navštěvovat.
> 
> I feel that in many/most Slavic languages the imperfective aspect would have been used instead because of_ several times,_ which shows repetition, and that is one of the uses of the imperfective, but I'd like a confirmation from you guys. I'd also appreciate it if you could translate this sentence.



I think this is the same difference in the use of aspect that has already been discussed in this thread (see posts #8 and below). Basically, in some Slavic languages, perfective aspect is often used for repeated actions, but not in others. I know that this is one of the major differences in the use of aspect between Croatian and Russian.

In Croatian and other BCS variants, perfective aspect would be used in this sentence:

_Nekoliko puta *sam posjetio* političkog komesara jedinice. 
Several times *I visited (perf.)* the politruk of the unit.  
_ 
Things work the same way in repeated actions in the present tense (e.g. those describing an ongoing habit or routine), and also in the future. You can see an example in the present tense here.

That being said, the imperfective aspect is also used sometimes in sentences of this sort. In fact, it wouldn't sound too bad even if you used it in the above sentence (although perfective sounds much more natural). As always with the aspect, it's a matter of subtle intuition rather than logical rules. The only reasonable rule I can think of is the following: imagine that you're referring to a single instance of the repeated action/event that happened in the past. Whatever aspect you would use to refer to this single instance, you should also use the same aspect for its repeated occurrence. Of course, the rule is not 100% foolproof, but that's more or less how things work.

In any case, this is very, very different from the way things work in East Slavic languages and (if I'm not mistaken) in Polish.


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## Thomas1

> Navštívil jsem několikrát politruka útvaru. (I visited/saw the army unit's politruk several times.)


_Odwiedziłem politruka oddziału kilka razy._
I visited (perfective) the army unit's politruk several times.
Definitely perfective aspect sounds better in this sentence--you list the instances and focus on the fact of rending the visits.

Imperfective suggests to me periods of visiting and a sort of routinous action, but you would have to come up with an appropriate context to use it like that, e.g.:
_Odwiedzałem politruka oddziału kilka razy w tygodniu._
This one sounds good because you're referring to a habitual action in the past.

Tom


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## Outsider

Does the imperfective, then, have the same sense as "I would visit the army unit's _politruk_ several times" [regularly, during some time in the past]?


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## Thomas1

Yes, Outsider, it says that it was your regular way of doing someting.

I should have given the translation of my sample sentence I provided in my previous post: _
Odwiedzałem politruka oddziału kilka razy w tygodniu.
I would visit the army unit's politruk several times a week._
Without this additional bit, _a week_, the sentence sounds somewhat odd. I am wondering whether "I would visit the army unit's _politruk_ several times" sounds good in English?

Tom


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## Outsider

No, it does sound decontextualized, too. It's much better with the addition of "a week".


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## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> Does the imperfective, then, have the same sense as "I would visit the army unit's _politruk_ several times" [regularly, during some time in the past]?



That exact answer probably depends on the Slavic language in question.  In Croatian, you might use either perfective or imperfective aspect for sentences of this sort, and sometimes you might even want to use the conditional, as in English. It all depends on the intuition awakened by the time adverb/adverbial phrase used in the sentence, and these intuitions are often baffling for non-native speakers. 

By the way, I'm not sure if your English example is very good: (?)"I would visit him several times" sounds to me like an incomplete sentence, since the conditional implies that the "several times"  routine itself gets repeated regularly, as in e.g. "I would visit him several times a week" (meaning that this was going on week after week). 

Or is this exactly what you had in mind? In that case, the answer for Croatian is yes. With the pattern "repeatedly, N times per unit of time", the imperfective aspect is used:

_Posjećivao sam _[imperf.]_ ga pet/nekoliko/mnogo puta godišnje/tjedno/na dan.
I would visit __him five/several/many times a year/a week/a day._

Perfective would definitely sound wrong in the above sentence. However, you could arguably express the same meaning with perfective or imperfective conditional instead of the imperfective indicative above. Generally, the use of conditional for repeated actions in the past is a murky issue over which you might see disagreement even among native speakers. This grammatical feature is rare to nonexistent in most (if not all) colloquial Croatian dialects, so many people absorb it imperfectly from the formal standard language.


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