On the Development of the Imperfective General-Factual in Russian

Abstract

This article attempts to shed light on the development of the Russian imperfective general-factual (IGF) in Russian. It argues that the Modern Russian IGF arose as an amalgam of different kinds of imperfective usage, and that there are two overall sources for the various types of the Modern Russian IGF: the original process meaning of imperfective verbs, and the assertion of the existence of one or more points in time when a situation took place expressed by the class of habitual verbs. With regard to the former, it is argued that the round-trip meaning of indeterminate and prefixed imperfective verbs of motion in Modern Russian was not original and developed from the process meaning of such verbs. It is further argued that the imperfective correlates of highly resultative verbs served as tokens in the spread of the IGF from highly resultative verbs to less obviously resultive types of verbs, such as verbs of communication. In this regard it is suggested that verbs of motion and verbs of transmission (e.g., give, present, send) played an important role in the emergence of the IGF, which began to appear more or less as we know it in the seventeenth century.