TAKING APART RUSSIAN RAZ
Laura Alexis Janda, Tore Nesset · The Slavic and East European Journal · 2016
Aspectually paired prefixed verbs like cflenarb 'do' and pa3,apo6nTb 'crumble' have the same lexical meanings as their unprefixed imperfective base verbs tejian, 'do' and ,apo6nTb 'crumble'. This observation motivates the assump tion that the prefixes in such verbs bear no meaning. We offer two sets of ar guments against the existence of empty prefixes/nycTbie ripucTaBKn in Russian. The first set of arguments presents data on the statistical distribution of prefixes, extracted from a database of verb pairs.1 If the prefixes represented semantic zeroes, we would expect an arbitrary distribution. However, the data are structured in non-random ways, indicating that the prefixes have unique and non-equivalent profiles. The second set of arguments presents a case study of a single prefix, namely pa3-. Two groups of uses of the prefix are compared: a) uses where the prefix does not play a purely aspectual role and the mean ing is clearly evident, as in pa30CJiaTb 'distribute, send to various destinations' (cf. base verb cnarb 'send') or pa3>Kenb 'kindle' (cf. base verb aceib 'burn'); and b) uses where the prefix does not seem to contribute meaning, as in pacTaaTb 'melt', the perfective partner of xaaxb 'melt'. This comparison re veals strong isomorphism between the range of meanings expressed by the prefix in the a) group uses and the range of meanings expressed by the base verbs in the b) group uses. We argue that this isomorphism creates an illusion of semantic emptiness in the b) uses where the meaning of the base verb and prefix overlap, rendering the contribution of the prefix redundant. Redun dancy, however, is not the same as emptiness. The meaning of the prefix is al ways present and always relevant since it plays the crucial role of determining which prefix is appropriate for each base verb. This interpretation of the role of the prefix comports well with both the distributional facts and the semantic analysis of pa3-. We propose that the Russian verbal prefixes serve as verb classifiers, and that this proposal can be supported by parallel studies of the re maining prefixes and by typological comparisons.