The Relation of Slavic Verb Prefixes to Perfective Aspect

This paper advances two main theses: The first overarching thesis is that the Slavic perfective/imperfective distinction is predominantly of a lexical-derivational nature. Among the categories of the tense–modality–aspect (TMA) system, Slavic aspect systems represent marginal categories, rather than core ones, which are realized by means of inflectional morphology. The second, and related, thesis concerns the status of Slavic verb prefixes in Slavic aspect systems, given that prefixed verbs constitute the bulk of their perfective verbs. I will provide some arguments, also defended elsewhere, that Slavic verb prefixes are not perfective markers, e.g., do not spell out a functional head/feature in the dedicated aspect structure, as is often assumed in syntactic theories of aspect, and neither do they carry a uniform semantic function for the interpretation of perfective aspect. Instead, Slavic verb prefixes are best treated as separate from perfectivity, on both formal and semantic grounds. This separation, however, does not mean that the two are unrelated. Here, the semantics of perfectivity is represented by means of the maximalization operator (maxe). The most fundamental requirement for its application, and for any maximalization operator for that matter, is that it respect some ordering criterion. It is the role of Slavic verb prefixes to contribute to its specification. They do so by virtue of having common uses/meanings that can be analyzed as extensive or intensive measure functions or vague quantifiers over arguments of verbs to which they are attached. Such meanings are reducible to a uniform scalar-based representation, from which the requisite ordering criterion can be extracted.