Semantic Motivations for Aspectual Clusters of Russian Verbs

Lexical meaning and aspect do not function independently in Russian. The meanings of verbs motivate their aspectual behavior because different types of events and their relationship to time are conceptualized in different ways. This article demonstrates how the presence of specific components in the meanings of Russian verbs correlates with the formation of specific types of Perfectives. The aspectual derivation patterns of Russian verbs are transparently motivated by the meanings of the verbs themselves. In order to explore how differences in meaning motivate differences in the aspectual behavior of verbs, it is necessary to replace the overly-simplistic "pair" model of Russian aspect with a more nuanced model, the "cluster" model, which recognizes various types of Perfectives and cluster structures based on a single Implicational Hierarchy. This article is devoted to the three metaphors that motivate the patterns observed in the Russian aspectual system. The structure of aspectual clusters is highly constrained due to the logic of how the metaphors interact, motivating the Implicational Hierarchy which in turn orders the composition of clusters. The different cluster structures associated with different verbs are largely predictable from the lexical meanings of the verbs. In this model motion verbs play a central, prototypical role in aspect, rather than being relegated to the status of oddities. Bi-aspectual verbs are also accommodated. 2. The Pair Model vs. the Cluster Model All Russian verbs are either Perfective (marked here with a superscript "p") or Imperfective (marked with a superscript "i") in all forms and tenses, and indeed even bi-aspectual verbs are never ambiguous in context (Isachenko 1960: 143-44; Muchnik 1966: 61; Avilova 1968: 66; Galton 1976: 294; Gladney 1982: 202; Chertkova 1996: 100-9; Jaszay 1999: 169; Zalizniak and Shmelev 2000: 10; but note the lone dissenter Timberlake (2004: 407-9), who refers to bi-aspectual verbs as "anaspectual"). The ubiquity of the Perfective vs. Imperfective distinction, combined with the existence of verbs such as !"#$%"&' p and #$%"&' i , both of which mean 'write', but differ only in their aspect, has inspired several generations of Slavists to claim that all (or nearly all) Russian verbs exist as aspectual "pairs" (cf. for example