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A Time-Relational Analysis of Russian Aspect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Wolfgang Klein
Wolfgang Klein*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
*
Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, Wundtlaan 1, NL-6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands
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Abstract

The meaning of the Russian perfective-imperfective opposition is usually characterized in terms such as ‘the situation is seen in its totality vs. not in its totality, with a boundary vs. without a boundary’, and similar ones. These characterizations, while expressing important intuitions, fail on a number of grounds. Aspects are purely temporal relations between the time at which some situation obtains and the time for which an assertion is made by the utterance which describes this situation. This leads to simple and precise definitions of the two Russian aspects. The intuitive characterizations familiar from the literature follow in a natural way from these definitions.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 71 , Issue 4 , December 1995 , pp. 669 - 695
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the Linguistic Society of America

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