Biaspectuality in prefixed verbs in contemporary Serbian

The subject of this paper is prefixed verbs in contemporary Serbian which, in the heading of a dictionary entry, bear both aspectual labels ? perfective (svr(s).) and imperfective (nesvr(s).) ? as well as prefixed verbs in which at least one of the semantic realizations can appear in both aspects, or in which aspectual markers alternate within a polysemous structure. Although biaspectuality in prefixed verbs is uncommon, since prefixes typically introduce perfectivity, a considerable number of such verbs have been recorded in a corpus compiled from descriptive dictionaries of the Serbian language. The aim of the study is to examine the nature of this biaspectuality, to describe its types, and to determine whether these are indeed genuine biaspectual verbs in every case. The material shows that biaspectuality occurs both in prefixed verbs formed from bound stems and in verbs where the prefix carries lexical meaning and performs a mutational function. A particular phenomenon is formal biaspectuality, which represents the coexistence of imperfective verbs (formed through secondary imperfectivization of prefixed verbs) and perfective prefixed verbs within a single dictionary entry. This phenomenon should be distinguished from biaspectuality as a grammatical category; in this case, it is a lexical phenomenon ? homonymy.