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The traditional “pair” model of Russian aspect fails to distinguish among Perfectives and ignores the fact that most verbs exist in larger clusters of three or more aspectually related forms. I propose semantic parameters that account for the interaction of aspect and actionality and use them to construct a semantic map of Russian aspectual relationships. I show, using a multiply stratified sample of 283 verb clusters (including over 2000 verbs), that the composition of clusters conforms to a strict implicational hierarchy that predicts all and only the cluster types attested in Russian. The proposed model replaces aspectual “pairs” with a model that captures the more complex reality of aspectual relationships among Russian verbs and provides a hypothesis for cross-linguistic comparison.
Laura A. Janda (Thu,) studied this question.