Aspectual Clusters of Russian Sound Verbs

Abstract

This article explores whether the aspectual cluster model proposed by Janda (2007, 2008) can reflect the differences in the lexical semantics of Russian verbs denoting sound. A corpus of fifty sound verbs, including both sounds emitted by inanimate objects and those produced by animate beings, are divided into two groups: (i) paired verbs marking linguistics action, and (ii) paired verbs marking directional motion. Aspectual clusters for each verb were determined, and the clusters of various groups of verbs compared. Each of these groups was found to be characterized by a specific subset of aspectual cluster types.