Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Perfective and imperfectie forms/reply (8)

No they can't look them up there, because they are mixed with verbs which are base lemmas. You can't look up them and only them.

No they do not occur as equal pairs. One is more basic, by being much more used. That's the reason why it is chosen as a base lemma. If you fire up a corpus search, or a simple web search on šmrknuti (perfective) vs. šmrkati (imperfective), you'd see that the latter is used many times more. That's the criteria that ordinary (paper) dictionaries use when deciding on which form to lemmatize, and which form to treat as "alternative form". The base form, whether it's perfective and imperfective, is associated with the basic meaning of the verb, namely the type of action that it represents. That form is most likely the original form, and the other one is the derived form, through some of the many possible morphological means of perfectivization/imperfectivization of the base verbal stem. It's not at all different to base noun vs. the diminutive. There are many suffixes to make diminutives, and not all of them are attested in usage. Diminutives don't just "pop up into existence" together with the base noun. They are unpredictable. Just like it makes sense to browse the category of diminutives alone, it makes sense to browse the category of perfective/imperfective alternative forms.

When you argue to delete categories on other forms of alternative forms for all the other languages, then I'll be fine with the deletion of Serbo-Croatian alternative forms by perfectiveness as well. Until that happen, leave those categories alone. There was no consensus to delete them, and you're acting all by yourself, ignoring the established protocol.