Abstract
This paper examines the distribution of Czech perfective and imperfective verbs denoting the same objective entity, e.g. in questions Kdo to přeložil? ("Who has translated this?" - perfective), and Kdo to překládal? ("Who translated this?" - imperfective). The research is based on a Vilem Mathesius''s study (1947), which gives various reasons for this aspectual distribution (temporal actualisation, emphasis on the result of an action or its progress).
This paper aims at exploring this phenomenon using corpus data and finding out whether and how the use of different aspects in these types of sentences actually influences their meaning. It also seeks to determine which devices are used when translating these sentences into English and to what degree other grammatical devices, e.g. the verb tense system, correspond with these aspectual oppositions.
The research sources are the latest SYN2010 corpus of synchronic written Czech, the ORAL2008 corpus of synchronic spoken Czech and the Czech-English and English-Czech database of the parallel corpus InterCorp.