Aspect use in the imperative and the prescriptive infinitive in recipes in Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Russian: A comparative account

Abstract: In this article, I present the results of a comparative study of the use of aspect in Bosnian (Bn), Croatian (Hr), Serbian (Sr) and Russian (Ru) imperatives and prescriptive infinitives—infinitives used with imperative function—as these verb forms are used in recipes. Based on an initial survey I narrow down my object of study to a limited set of verb phrases, including equivalents of the transitive ‘to bake’ and ‘to fry’, ‘to boil’, ‘to knead a dough’, ‘to cut’ and ‘to chop’, ‘to sprinkle’ and ‘to strew’, and ‘to fill’ and ‘to stuff’. The common denominator of (most of) these verb phrases is that they involve an incremental theme in the form of a direct object, of which the referent gets its qualities changed during a process. Typically, the situation type in question is an accomplishment, in the sense of Vendler (1957). Based on analyses of this corpus, from which I provide more than 40 examples, I draw the following conclusions. First, the use of aspect in the imperative and the prescriptive infinitive, as these verb forms are used in recipes, is approximately identical in all four languages. Second, the use of what I refer to as the fake IPF – the use of IPF to refer to a single, complete event – is more widespread in Bn, Hr and Sr than in Russian. The latter is contrary to the results of Benacchio (2010), von Waldenfels (2012) and Alvestad (2013) and suggests that the aspect use in the imperative and the prescriptive infinitive in literature such as recipes deserves further investigation.