Russian aspect from a cognitive linguistic perspective

This article discusses the category of verbal aspect in Russian (as a representative of East Slavic) from the point of view of cognitive linguistics and Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar in particular. It develops the concept of temporal definiteness to explain two crucial features of the Russian perfective: its limitation to overt and convert contexts of sequentiality, and its strong tendency to refer to an event that is unique in a situational context. This approach is complemented by an analysis of perfectivity as epistemic contiguity, which is pre-temporal. The imperfective is argued to refer merely to a type of verbal situation, and in statements of fact to express the presence of a purpose on the part of the speaker that is orthogonal to the original temporal/causal sequence of an action as well as its original goal. The article then discusses some cognitive linguistic approaches to the morphology of Russian aspect, in particular the cluster approach to aspectual correlations and its relation aspectual pairhood. In doing so, it reinterprets aspectual pairhood as a high degree of mutual entrenchment between perfective and imperfective correlates. Such entrenchment relations can exist to a lower degree between perfective and imperfective correlates that are not recognized as “pairs”. Lastly, it outlines a Cognitive Grammar/Construcion Grammar approach to perfectivizing prefixation, whereby prefixed verbs represent morphological constructions with perfectivity as an emergent quality.