TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF THE VERBAL ASPECTUAL PAIR: IMPERFECTIVE VERBS IN STAGE DIRECTIONS

The paper deals with Russian imperfective verbs in stage directions. It is common knowledge that in stage directions verbs in present tense are able to denote not only a lasting action (process), but also its beginning, e.g. «chitaet gazetu» [‘reading a newspaper’; lit. ‘reads a newspaper’] can denote ‘beginning to read a newspaper’ [lit. ‘begins to read a newspaper’]. The problem is determining whether the component ‘begin’ is a part of the grammatical meaning of an imperfective verb, or a part of its lexical meaning, or perhaps a peculiar semantic accretion. I solve the problem in the framework of my approach [Uryson 2019]. In [Uryson 2019] I have suggested a semantic interpretation of Maslov's criterion: since, in Maslov’s contexts, imperfective verbs denote events but not lasting processes, and since verbs in an aspectual pair have the same lexical meaning, we can consider that the semantic component ‘event’ (or the “resulting event”, completing the process/action) is a part of the lexical meaning of both verbs in an aspectual pair. Two verbs in a given aspectual pair differ only in the modal or temporal characteristics of the “resulting event”, and this characteristic is a part of the aspectual meaning of a verb. In this paper, I demonstrate that if a verb is able to denote the beginning of an action (a process) in a stage direction, then the component ‘begin’ is a part of its lexical meaning. A special feature of this component is that it is semantically accentuated only in some Maslovian contexts. I refine Maslov's criterion on the basis of the suggested analysis.