The Formation of Aspectual Pairs of Borrowed ova-verbs in Russian

When a verb is borrowed into Russian, it must adapt to the Russian aspectual system. The borrowed verb takes on the functions of one of the two aspects and often (but not always) forms a corresponding verb in the other aspect, forming what is called an aspectual pair, one imperfective and one perfective verb sharing meaning but differing in aspect. Most new verbs in Russian are borrowed from languages that do not have the imperfective–perfective aspectual opposition. For this reason, borrowed verbs give us an interesting opportunity to study the mechanisms behind the formation of aspectual pairs. This observational study consists of 248 unprefixed verbs ending on -ovat′ or -evat′, borrowed during the twentieth century. The material was gathered from the Russian National Corpus (RNC), from the online dictionary Wiktionary, and from seven printed dictionaries from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The results of the study are that the most common method to form aspectual pairs is prefixation; the most common aspectual prefixes are za-, s-, pro- and ot-; the choice of prefix is influenced by the meaning of the verb; and that the overlap in meaning between prefix and verb is especially visible in verbs with spatial meaning.