Time and the Event: the Semantics of Russian Prefixes

The vast majority of prefixed roots fall into the perfective class, although there are some perfectives that are not prefixed. Imperfective verb forms are either unprefixed altogether, or possess a suffixal marker of imperfectivity (generally called the ‘secondary’ imperfective). The analytical problem is this: despite this apparently uniform effect on the interpretation of the tense morphology in the language, there is evidence that the prefixes in Russian are a heterogeneous class from a semantic and even distributional point of view. The notions implicated in describing the semantic effect of prefixes have included ‘boundedness’, ‘telicity’, ‘result augmentation’, ‘perfectivity’ in various different works on the subject. The problem is not just a terminological one, but reflects a genuine complexity in the different levels at which aspectual composition is calculated. At the same time, the richness of the overt exponents of aspect in a language like Russian make it an important empirical domain for understanding the temporal, aspectual and event structural