Slavic Performatives Were Originally Marked for General Aspect

It is generally claimed that the prototypical tempo-as-pectual form for explicit performatives in most of the contemporary Slavic languages is the imperfective non-past (NPIPF, e.g., Russian directive prošu “I ask”). In this paper it is argued that NPIPF is the outcome of the functional expansion of the (proto-)imperfective aspect in Late Common Slavic and that Slavic performatives were originally marked for general (i.e., not overtly imperfective) aspect (Maslov 2004). Indirect evidence in favour of this hypothesis is provided from Old Slovene, contemporary Serbo-Croatian, and the distribution of perfective performative forms in the contemporary Slavic languages.