On the Morphosyntax of Russian Verbal Aspect

Abstract

Aspect is a syntactic feature of the sentence predicate, the Infl head of which is generated +Pfv or-Pfv and +Past or -Past. Verb forms comply with these features or are inflected for them. Prefix-verb compounds are base-generated in the sentence, not stored in the lexicon. They provide the environment for the Secondary Imperfective Rule, which assigns the feature +Iter to V. This feature governs the introduction of themes between the verb root and the ending. The +Iter feature can also be generated with the verb independently of the SIR, which yields the so-called procedurals. Among unprefixed verbs, those are grammatical in +Pfv predicates which are +Telic (have a telos or goal), which depends on their formal and semantic properties.