Severing Perfectivity from the Verb

It is generally assumed that verbs in Russian are specified as perfective or imperfective in the lexicon. This paper develops an alternative: verbs are lexically aspectless, and aspectual operators only enter the derivation when the functional structure of a clause is created. The crucial evidence for this view comes from two facts about argument-supporting nominalizations. First, unlike fully inflected clauses, nominalizations based on “perfective” verb stems do not exhibit perfectivity effects, and hence aspect is not part of their structure. Secondly, fully inflected clauses and nominals share a constituent containing VP and a restricted number of functional projections dominating it. It follows from these two generalizations that aspectual operators must be located outside the constituent clauses and nominals have in common. This conclusion makes it possible to reduce crucially cross-linguistic variation in the domain of aspect and to eliminate theoretically undesirable assumptions that aspect in languages like Russian and languages like English is construed in different ways.