Non-prototypical Aspectual Clusters and Corpus Data: the grozit’ ‘threaten’ cluster in Russian

Summary Aspectual clusters and aspectual triplets have received considerable attention in scholarly literature on Russian aspect but are normally not treated together. In the present study, we offer a detailed corpus-based analysis of a non-prototypical cluster that includes a triplet. Exploring the verb grozit’ ‘threaten’ and aspectually related verbs, we demonstrate that the three perfective near-synonyms pogrozit’, prigrozit’ and ugrozit’ are semantically distinct, insofar as pogrozit’ tends to be used about “gestural threats”, while prigrozit’ and ugrozit’ typically occur in “verbal threats”. Ugrozit’ is shown to be marginal in Contemporary Standard Russian. We suggest that the two imperfective verbs grozit’ and ugrožat’ are semantically distinct since they display different collocation patterns. With regard to diachrony, it is shown that ugrozit’ was attested early, and is likely to have motivated the formation of the secondary imperfective ugrožat’ . Ugrozit’ was subsequently (nearly) outcompeted by prigrozit’ and pogrozit’ , which eventually developed affinities for verbal vs. gestural threats. The proposed analysis has implications for Russian linguistics, corpus linguistics, and language pedagogy.