Abstract
Russian verbs are considered to form aspectual pairs, perfective and imperfective. However, this system is complicated by the existence of so-called aspectual triplets, in which one perfective verb has two imperfective correlates (a primary imperfective and a secondary imperfective). This article offers new insights into the discussion of this controversial issue. While aspectual triplets have traditionally been treated as marginal, we present a systemic account of this phenomenon based on a corpus study of a comprehensive list of Russian aspectual triplets. In addition, contrary to some previous approaches, we propose unified semantics for the secondary imperfectives, namely, a telic process. We show that the meaning of a secondary imperfective is the result of interaction among the meaning of the prefix, the meaning of the verbal stem, and the general semantics of the secondary imperfective. We argue that the secondary imperfective is marginal if the semantics of the prefix or the semantics of the verbal stem are not compatible with the notion of result.
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