contituative morphology crosslinguistically

[Peter Arkadiev]

Dear colleagues,

I would like to ask for your generous help with the data on the expression of meanings which could be called "continuative" (not to mix up with "continuous"). In order to clarify what I have in mind, let me give an example from Lithuanian:

(i) Jonas gyvena Kaune. (John-nom.sg live-prs Kaunas-loc.sg)
'Jonas lives/is living in Kaunas'

(ii) Jonas tebe-gyvena Kaune.
'Jonas is still living in Kaunas'

(iii) Jonas nebe-gyvena Kaune.
'Jonas is no more living in Kaunas'

In Lithuanian, the verbal prefix tebe- expresses the continuative meaning, while its negative version nebe- is used for the negation of this meaning (I call this "discontinuative"). Basically, continuative and discontinuative are roughly equivalent to English adverbials "still" and "no more" in contexts like (ii) and (iii), respectively. 

My question is whether you could kindly give me examples of languages where these meanings are grammaticalized, and also refer me to any relevant literature, especially of typological nature (btw I know Manfred Krifka's work on the meaning of 'still' and 'already', and I would like to anticipate that I consider the English construction "keep V-ing" to bear a different, though related, function). 

Thank you very much in advance!

Peter

-- 
Peter Arkadiev, PhD
Institute of Slavic Studies
Russian Academy of Sciences 
Leninsky prospekt 32-A 119334 Moscow
peterarkadiev at yandex.ru
http://www.inslav.ru/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=279