The phrase structure of phase verbs: An initial contrastive analysis of English and Russian

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Abstract

This squib carries out an initial contrastive analysis of English and Russian phase (a.k.a. aspectual) verbs. Following Fukuda's (2008; 2009) syntactic account of English, I assume English phase verbs can head one of two aspectual functional projections: H-AspP, located immediately above vP; or L-AspP, located between vP and VP. Applying the same diagnostics to Russian, it appears that Russian phase verbs head only L-AspP. The relation between L-AspP and another structurally similar aspectual projection, AspP, proposed by Mac- Donald (2008a;b), is discussed. We see that L-AspP has a subset of the aspectual properties of AspP. Finally, I note how this approach to Russian phase verbs leads to the expectation that semantic properties of Russian phase verb complements play a role in some of the phase verb complement (in)compatibility patterns. In concrete, I suggest that the aspectual class of the complement plays a role.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)261-276
Number of pages16
JournalActa Linguistica Hungarica
Volume58
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 1 2011

Keywords

  • English
  • Russian
  • aspectual class
  • event structure
  • phase verbs
  • verb phrase structure

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language

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