Aspect coding asymmetries of verbs: The case of Russian

This paper presents preliminary corpusbased evidence from Russian for an “aspectual coding asymmetry”. The main research question is: Can different lengths of aspectual verb forms be predicted? We assume that each verb has a default aspectual value and that this value can be estimated based on frequency, which according to Zipf (1936) has a negative correlation to length. Our study provides evidence that the aspectual default value is a better predictor of lengths of verb forms in Russian than frequency. In addition, we observed a positive but weaker impact of information content (Cohen Priva, 2008; Piantadosi et al., 2011), estimated from the verbs’ syntactic dependents. A final result is the tendency for the impact of frequency to level out as IC increases