Variation , aspectual interpretation and

A widely adopted classification of aspectual type is that based on Vendler’s (1967) four-way aspectual classification of verbs into accomplishments, achievements, activities and statives. Moreover, some have assumed, either explicitly or implicitly, that this aspectual classification is universal (see, for instance, Borer 2005, Krifka 1992, Filip 1999). That is, each language has predicates that can be classified as accomplishments, achievements, activities and statives. Of course, part of the assumption that these predicate classes are universal, necessarily depends on how they are defined. In this paper, I provide one piece of evidence that telic predicates in Russian are all achievements. That is, there are no accomplishments in Russian. Achievements are widely considered to describe events as punctual, essentially instantaneous (Rothstein 2004, Dowty 1979, Vendler 1967), and an intuition about the interpretation of Slavic perfective forms of verbs is that they describe point-like events (Comrie 1976, Ridjanović 1979, and references therein). The claim here is not that all perfective forms are achievements, since it has already been shown that not all perfectivized verbs are telic (Borik 2002). Nevertheless, I will suggest that the intuition regarding perfective forms reflects a fact about telic predicates in Russian: they are point-like; they are achievements. The addition of a lexical prefix to a bare imperfective verb results in a telic interpretation of the predicate. There are also bare unprefixed perfective verb forms as well (i.e. dat “give” kupit’ “buy”) that are also telic. These two classes of telic predicates behave the same. Additionally, an imperfective verb form can give rise to a telic interpretation as well, on what has been referred to as a general factual interpretation (Borik 2002, Dickey 2000). In this paper, I focus on lexically prefixed forms of the verb and the general factual interpretation of imperfective forms (from here on GFI imperfectives). I discuss their behavior as the complements to phase verbs (i.e. perestat’ “stop”, načat’ “begin” etc.). In particular, through a comparison of English phase