Imperfectivability of Russian prefixal perfectives: Regularity and peculiarities

The article provides the results of the study of the imperfectivability (the possibility of suffixal imperfectivation) of Russian prefixed verbs listed according to the Dictionary of the Russian Language. Each monosemic lexeme from the sample was aligned with its imperfective correlate (IPFV2) according to three sources: Yevgenieva’s dictionary, Russian National Corpus (ruscorpora.ru), Google and Yandex Search Engine Results pages (Runet). The results revealed that the average level of the imperfectivability of Russian prefixed verbs rounded to integers lies in the range of 77 % (according to the dictionary data) to 92 % (when taking into account unconventional IPFV2s encountered in RNC and the Russian-language Internet) according to maximal samples, while the minimal samples demonstrated a 80 % to 94 % average imperfectivability level. Thus, the suffixal imperfectivation meets the requirement of regularity of an inflectional category even on the level of a normative dictionary. Moreover, when the RNC and Runet data are also considered, the compliance with the regularity requirement becomes obvious. In addition to assessing the average level of imperfectivability, the paper describes suffixal imperfectivation of specialized subcategories of verbs within prefixal groups, such as denominatives, perfectives formed from perfective simplex stems, verbs ending in -i(zi)rovat’, morphologically marked Aktionsarten and verbs with the suffix -(a)nu-. The acquired results confirm descriptive adequacy of the two-component model of Russian aspect. According to this model, aspect is an inflectional category realized exclusively through suffixal imperfectivation and limited to prefixal verbs (the first component), while actionality is the foundation and explanation for imperfective (and, less frequently, perfective) functioning of simplex verbs (the second component).

Axiology of “Russian“ in the prose of Jaroslav Rudiš

The article is devoted to the assessment of the “Russian” aspect in Czech history and culture based on the prose of Jaroslav Rudiš. Jaroslav Rudiš, one of the most prominent contemporary Czech writers, was born in Turnov (1972). Since the publishing of “The Sky under Berlin” (2002), his work has positively attracted the attention of critics and has won a wider community of readers, which is evidenced by several reprints of his books and a considerable interest in the new one. Jaroslav Rudiš distinguishes himself from the other modern Czech authors by the ability to soberly, aptly and relevantly describe the problems of contemporaries. His characters are people who personally experienced the “whiff ” of the history and felt changes in Czech society over the second half of the 20th century. Despite the fact that Rudiš does not write explicitly about Russia, does not talk about the eternal themes of Russian philosophy and culture and does not discuss positive or negative aspects of Russian influence on international politics, he shows the impact of the “Russian” aspect on the course of the newest Czech history quite accurately and ironically, although infrequently. Russia and the “Russian” in the prose of the author are mentioned in connection with the events in the lives of individual heroes who perceive the Russian aspect as given and periodically interacting with their lives depending on the circumstances. The views of his characters are ambiguous: they are not strictly negative with regard to important events, but they are not thoughtlessly positive, when the breathtaking spirit and depriving rational thinking of the wonderful creative ability of the Russian soul are praised. The tonality of Rudiš’s prose is comparable to Dovlatov’s irony of the “Reserve” or to the poetry of the Yerofeyev’s “Moscow − Petushki”. The study of Rudish’s prose was carried out by the method of excerpt from the available Czech texts of the writer. Axiological characteristics (more than 120 citations from 7 works of the author) relevant for representing the image of the “Russian” in Czech literature were analyzed from the point of view of imagological criteria.the religious feeling.

Time out of tense: Russian aspect in the imperative

This article analyzes Russian aspectual usage in the imperative by combining Šatunovskij’s (2009) approach with Dickey’s (2018) cognitive linguistic theory of Russian aspect. It argues that the contrasting use of perfective and imperfective imperatives in mands for the completion of a single action can be explained in terms of the pragmatic mechanisms proposed by Šatunovskij (2009): perfective imperatives signal a request on the part of the speaker for the listener to make the decision to carry out the action, whereas imperfective imperatives make no such signal, because the decision has already been made. The latter occurs when the speaker knows or infers that the listener has already made the decision (or will do so if given the chance), or when the speaker has suspended the listener’s decision-making role and has gone ahead and made the decision. Various contextual uses of affirmative and negated imperatives and analyzes them in terms of the request or lack thereof for the listener to make the decision to carry out the action. The functions of the perfective and imperfective aspects in imperatives are argued to be instantiations of temporal definiteness and temporal indefiniteness (respectively). Inasmuch as this is true, Russian aspect codes alternative construals of time in non-finite usage as well as finite usage.

The Economy of the Pandemic: A Far Eastern Russian Aspect

The article presents continuation of analysis of national and international aspects in assessment of economic after-effects of a new corona virus pandemic. It analyzes the finance and economy performance for 11 months of 2020 with a stress on specific economic situation in the Far Eastern Federal Okrug (FEFO, district). It regards a basic difference in the pandemic situation between overall Russia and its Far East. The author notes that the macro region demonstrates a tighter balance between the load and the available reserves in primary health care (medical and social) as compared to Russia overall. Estimated and assessed are economic losses related to the pandemic in the key structural segments of the Far Eastern Russia economy (industry, budgets, foreign trade, labour market, construction). Variance of program indicators is considered. The following most meaningful lines of the pandemic influence on the Far East economy have been identified: curtailing output and revenue from a stop-over or even exit from the market; scaling-down production after a fall in demand; decreasing value of exports with closing borders; falling foreign market demand and falling mineral resource extraction; an upswing rise in prices caused by shrinking imports; a growing shortage of manpower from closed borders; growing expenses and decreasing tax revenues for regional budgets. Three larger FEFO economy sectors are described as to their losses from the pandemic: the bigger sector (almost 2/3 of the entire economy) is formed by the types of economic activity that have lost and are still losing revenue and those that have reduced turnover following the shrinking demand; 13% of the economy have suffered from a spring lock-down; approximately 20% of the economy are either winners or those neutral to the situation

ASPECTUAL TRIPLETS OF THE RUSSIAN VERB IN DIACHRONY: EVIDENCE FROM THE RUSSIAN NATIONAL CORPUS

The paper deals with the so-called aspectual triplets of the Russian verb. Based on the data from the Russian National Corpus, it proposes a diachronic method to study triplets as well as a two-component model of the Russian aspect as an alternative to the traditional word-based classification model. The first component of the model is a morphological mechanism of the imperfectivizing suffixation of prefixed verbs that is inflectional (ras-kry-t’PFV — ras-kryva-t’IPFV2 ‘disclose, reveal’), but has a limited scope of action (prefixed verbs only). The second component of the model is the actionality (lexical aspect) with a maximal scope. Related to the verb class as a whole, it is especially crucial for non-prefixed simplexes. Actionality enables the functioning and perfective / imperfective characterization of simplexes which do not fall under the inflectional grammatical aspect. The analysis of ten biimperfective triplets resulted in several observations and conclusions. One of them concerns the role of a ‘joker’, which all imperfective simplexes (IPFV1) have in the aspectual triplets as (quasi)synonyms for corresponding secondary imperfectives (IPFV2). A working hypothesis on the predominance of IPFV1 over PFV in every triplet, based on the broader polysemy of the former, has not been confirmed. However, the two-component model has explanatory power for the cases of reverse frequency (PFV over IPFV1) through its lexical aspect component. Another working hypothesis on a possible increase or a decrease in the number of secondary imperfectives in diachrony was partially confirmed — an increase was noted for the 20/21st century.

What We Know about the Acquisition of Russian Aspect as a First, Second, and Heritage Language: State of the Art

This paper offers a state of the art review of the available linguistic scholarship on the acquisition of Russian aspect in various acquisition scenarios. While the studies reviewed here differ in their analyses of Russian verbal aspect, specific research questions, acquisition context, and research methodology, a common observation is that Russian aspectual contrasts are not easily acquired and that some may be more difficult to master than others. The review shows that some of these asymmetries are not unique to child grammars or to bilingual acquisition, but hold in all the acquisition contexts and may be determined by the complexity of the category itself, while others reflect developmental trends and effects of context and timing of acquisition. The paper starts with an overview of Russian aspect and the associated learning tasks, which is followed by the review of patterns emerging from studies on the acquisition of aspect by children, adult foreign language learners, and adult heritage speakers of Russian. The paper concludes with a discussion of the way these empirical findings can be connected to classroom contexts.

Construal vs. redundancy: Russian aspect in context

The relationship between construal and redundancy has not been previously explored empirically. Russian aspect allows speakers to construe situations as either Perfective or Imperfective, but it is not clear to what extent aspect is determined by context and therefore redundant. We investigate the relationship between redundancy and open construal by surveying 501 native Russian speakers who rated the acceptability of both Perfective and Imperfective verb forms in complete extensive authentic contexts. We find that aspect is largely redundant in 81% of uses, and in 17% of contexts aspect is relatively open to construal. We contend that anchoring in redundant contexts likely facilitates the independence of construal in contexts with less redundancy. However further research is needed to discover what makes contexts redundant since known cues for aspect are absent in the majority of such contexts. Native speakers are fairly consistent in giving the original aspect high ratings, but less consistent in rating the non-original aspect, indicating potential problems in testing the reactions of speakers to non-authentic data.

Genesis of the Definition “Goodwill” as Economical Category: International and Russian Aspect

The article is devoted to formation of the definition “Goodwill” in Russian accounting practice based on historical trends, regulations and standards. During the research the definition was explored from legal stand point, were considered major milestones in its development and, as a result, it was concluded that further development will be necessary due to acceptance of the International Financial Reporting Standards on territory of Russian Federation. It compares experience of the United States and Russia in regulation of the definition and its realization and recognition in financial reporting. As an economic category goodwill have gone through development of the definition reputation to the leading indicator of the company’s stability in merger and acquisition process. From this position, usage of goodwill in consolidated financial reporting is crucial and requires development of the mechanisms for implementation and guardianship of the intangible assets, its proper amortization and impairment.

Тенденция к оптимальной организации системы видовых пара- дигм в русском языке

The reorganization of the initial system of aspect paradigms in Old Russian is investigated within the framework of the theory of natural grammar. It is claimed, in accordance with this theory, that the grammatical changes in morphological systems of natural languages are determined by a limited set of typologically relevant markedness principles (naturalness principles or preference laws). These principles explain the attested diachrony of grammatical changes in the system of aspectual paradigms of the Russian verb and predict the general direction in its development. During the historical development of the system of aspectual paradigms in Russian, optimal iconic perfectivizing paradigms are ousting non-optimal countericonic imperfectivizing paradigms as well as non-optimal non-iconic aspectual syncretic paradigms. In contemporary Russian, aspectual paradigms of perfectivization are preferable in terms of competitive aspectual paradigms of imperfectivization and syncretic aspectual paradigms. The share of optimal paradigms of perfectivization is constantly increasing in modern Russian. Consequently, there is direct evidence for the development of the system of Russian aspect paradigms towards optimal organization of aspect paradigms, i.e. towards economy.

A corpus approach to the history of Russian po delimitatives

This paper illustrates how enriched diachronic treebank data can shed new light on an old and vexed topic, even when that topic is primarily morphological and semantic in nature rather than syntactic. The topic is the rise of the Russian po delimitatives, a change seen as crucial in most accounts of the history of Russian aspect, since it represents a major step in generalising the derivational aspect system. Earlier accounts concur that the po delimitatives spread fairly recently, too recently for the development to be connected to the loss of the aorist tense, which also had delimitative readings with atelic verbs. Using treebank data from the Tromsø Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic Treebank, enriched with tags for derivational morphology and semantics, I show that the po delimitatives were not marginal even in the earliest Slavic sources, either in terms of frequency or semantics, and that they first complemented and then competed with the delimitative aorists. It can thus be claimed that the exotic po delimitatives grew organically out of the old Indo-European inflectional aspect system.