Title
The spatio-temporal shape of events

Eugenia Romanova (CASTL)

Date:  27.04.2006

Time:  19:15

Venue:  E010 1

Description
As is well known, all the verbs in Russian are subdivided into two big groups according to their aspectual properties, traditionally labeled perfective and imperfective. These groups are coerced on the basis of syntactic distribution tests. Yet, they also demonstrate a lot of interpretational similarity, which instigated a discussion of `aspect competition' in traditional literature. This is so, because perfective and imperfective verbs are not uniform within their own classes. I further divide perfectives into lexically and superlexically prefixed verbs and imperfectives into progressive and pluractional.
The type of perfectivizing prefixation depends on the shape of the events imperfectives have prior to prefixation. Lexical prefixes cannot attach to a number of unergatives, superlexical prefixes cannot attach to "determinate" events. Even if the same type of prefix can attach to various types of imperfectives there is a curious pattern emerging with respect to the connection between the event shape of an unprefixed verb and the structure the verb ends up on prefixation. Unaccusative and transitive verbs with lexical prefixes nearly obligatorily require a spatial (directional) PP in their structure, whereas lexically prefixed unergatives are ungrammatical with directional PPs.
Motion verbs are a good piece of data for the analysis of the patterns above: directed (DMV) and non-directed motion verbs (NDMV) are both imperfective, yet the former always have a progressive interpretation, take only lexical prefixes and require directional PPs, while the latter have either progressive or pluractional interpretation, do not undergo lexical prefixation and, consequently, cannot take directional PPs. There is a quirk in the latter observation: not taking directional PPs is characteristic only of progressive non-directed motion verbs. DMV pattern with unaccusative verbs in passing unaccusativity tests and obligatorily combining with PPs when lexically prefixed, NDMV pattern with unergatives. I will treat Russian in parallel with languages having auxiliary choice and will apply Kayne's (1993) analysis to Russian unergatives as well: "have" is "BE+AT", both in possessive constructions and in unergatives. But unlike in other languages mentioned in Kayne, 1993, in Russian AT incorporates into the main verb, not into BE.
As we know from Svenonius, 2006, there are four abstract Path heads in the structure of prepositions: TO, FROM, VIA and AT. Assuming that normally these Path heads are lexicalized by lexical prefixes in Russian, we can explain why non-directed motion verbs cannot take lexical prefixes: NDMV already have an incorporated path.
There is a problematic issue remaining: pluractional NDMVs are compatible with directional prepositions in the same manner as other pluractional imperfectives are compatible with quantified objects. The nature of pluractionality is going to be discussed in brief at the end of the talk, if I have time, for it is also crucial for superlexical prefixation. Cumulative and distributive prefixes attach only to pluractional verbs, and, possibly, cumulativity and distributivity are not the contributions made by the superlexical prefixes in question, but by the shape of the event the pluractional verbs have (Landman, 2000). According to Kratzer, 2005, pluralizing of events can happen at different syntactic levels: lexical or phrasal. This is a possible solution for the issue under discussion.

Literature

Kayne, Richard. 1993. Toward a modular theory of auxiliary selection in Studia Linguistica 47 (1), pp.3-32
Kratzer, Angelika. 2005. On the plurality of verbs. Available at http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jI4YWRlO/
Landman, Fred. 2000. Events and Plurality. The Jerusalem lectures. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Dordrecht/Boston/London.
Svenonius, Peter. 2005-2006. The PP reading group within the Moving Right Along project. Available at http://hum.uit.no/mra