Perfectivity as aspectual definiteness: Time and the event in Russian

This paper seeks to give a unified semantics for perfectivity in Russian within an explicitly decompositional syntactic framework. The aim is to account for the similar behaviour of the perfective class of predicates, despite the differences in the syntactic and semantic behaviour of the prefixes that attach to imperfective roots to give the perfective form. The first part of the paper gives the data that show that prefix types must be separated into at least two types (‘inner’ or ‘lexical’ prefixes vs. ‘outer’ or ‘superlexical’ prefixes) and that traditional notions of telicity and/or quantization are not uniformly correlated with linguistic perfectivity. The second half of the paper argues for an interpretation of perfectivity as corresponding to the ‘definiteness’ of the assertion time with respect to the run time of the event, in terms of a syntax–semantics account that makes use of both event and time variables.