Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
935731 Lingua 2008 24 Pages PDF
Abstract

In Russian, optionally transitive verbs become obligatorily transitive with the addition of a lexical perfective prefix. This paper gives a Distributed Morphology approach to this problem. It argues that the Roots that underlie these verbs introduce no argument; in the imperfective case, the object is introduced by the verbalizing head, while in the perfective case, the object is introduced by the perfective prefix itself. The perfective prefix combines with the Root before it combines with the verbalizing head to create an altered Root that is interpreted as a state and introduces an internal argument. The analysis is then extended to explain some interesting asymmetries between imperfective and perfective verbs with passive participles and negation.

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Social Sciences and Humanities Arts and Humanities Language and Linguistics