Vendlerian Classes and the Russian Aspectual System

Abstract

This paper considers the relevance of the Vendlerian lexical aspectual classification of verbs in Russian. We focus on the lexical classes of accomplishments and activities and argue that the classification of verbs into activities and accomplishments cuts across the classification into perfective and imperfective verbs. Accomplishments display incremental structure and occur as perfectives and imperfectives. Activities do not display incremental structure and also occur in the perfective and imperfective aspect. The distinction between activities and accomplishments is expressed through their interactions with what we call incremental modifiers: modifiers which are sensitive to the incremental structure of the verb meaning. These modifiers include postepenno ‘gradually’, and ‘X by X’ modifiers such as stranica za stranicej ‘page by page’ and ètaž za ètažom ‘floor by floor’. Imperfective activities do not occur with either postepenno or the ‘X by X’ modifiers, and neither do the verb forms which Padučeva 1996 calls “delimited activities” (delimitativ). Accomplishments in both the imperfective and the perfective aspects occur with postepenno and the ‘X by X’ modifiers (although some Russian speakers find some examples of perfective accomplishments with ‘X by X’ modifiers unnatural owing to what we consider to be pragmatic reasons). We show that the behavior of these modifiers generally follows if we assign accomplishments the incremental structure posited in Rothstein 2004 and treat the modifiers as directly modifying the incremental structure.

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