CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN VERB STEMS ENDING IN "I" HAVE TWO VARIANT NONFINAL SUFFIXES TO MARK IMPERFECTIVE ASPECT, "IVAJ" AND "AJ." PURELY PHONOLOGICAL FACTORS DO NOT SEEM TO DETERMINE WHICH PREFIX IS USED AND THERE IS LITTLE EVIDENCE FOR A CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A PARTICULAR PREFIX AND A PREFERRED SUFFIX. IN MANY…

This article discusses presentation of Russian conjugation via the one-stem system advocated by Lipson and Townsend, and attempts a more unified and complete presentation of irregularities in imperfect derivation. Two major irregularities are occurrence of an unexpected suffix and unpredictable alternation in the root of the derived imperfective.…

Two consecutive sentences in Russian with the same verbal predicate often show an aspectual shift. The thematic role of the verb is underlined by lexical items that signal the communicative structure of the sentence. Interdependence between theme-rheme articulation is more important than the relationship between aspect and modality. (Text is in…

Examines the way the temporal adverbial factor restricts and clarifies the form and aspectuality of the Russian verb. The morphological aspect is one of a set of factors whose interaction determines the aspectual reading of a sentence. (NCR)

Two major mechanisms of encoding telicity across languages are either marking the object as exhaustively countable or measurable, or utilizing a specific prefix on the verbal form. English predominantly uses the first mechanism, while Russian mostly utilizes the second. The learning task of an English speaker acquiring Russian, then, is two-fold:…

Cross-linguistic borrowing (overt use of words from the other language) and transfer (use of semantic or syntactic structures from the other language without active switching to that language) were examined during language production in Russian-English bilinguals. Grammatical category (noun/verb) and level of concreteness were found to influence…

Discusses whether "kategorija ostojanija" (category of state) should be considered as a part of speech in Russian, proposes a definition of the term "part of speech," and suggests that short adjectives and impersonal nonverbal predicatives be viewed as a single part of speech with personal and impersonal subtypes like Russian verbs. (21…

It is argued that mastery of verbal aspect in Russian calls for the development in the student of a novel pattern of linguistic perception for actions and occurrences. (Author/RM)

Extension of an article in "Russisch," v6 n1 p1-8 1972. (DD)

Discusses the evolution and use of verb prefixes in Russian. The prefixes are classified by semantic content with subclasses of variants and problem verbs also given. (EKN)

Discusses the characterization of the meaning of the Russian perfective-imperfective opposition and concludes that these characterizations fail. The article maintains that aspects are temporal relations between the time at which some situation obtains and the time for which an assertion is made by the utterance that describes the situation. (33…

Linguistic expressions involving body parts (and other entities) belonging to an "interested person" often have unique grammatical properties, e.g., the dative case in Russian. The notion called Inalienable Possession (IP) is used to account for such properties. Semantic and pragmatic analyses account for some of the properties of IP in Russian.…

Proposes a variation of the two-stem system of analyzing the Russian verb. The need for greater organization and systematization is stressed, as well as an increased focus on the great regularity of the Russian verb, and the relative simplicity of Russian verbal morphology. (SL)