The present study investigates the 'aspectual' relationship between the two volition verbs in Russian, xotet' and zaxotet', focusing on the similarities and differences in lexical and aspectual semantics between them, and further t ...
The present study investigates the 'aspectual' relationship between the two volition verbs in Russian, xotet' and zaxotet', focusing on the similarities and differences in lexical and aspectual semantics between them, and further touches on the issue of aspect selection in the infinitival complement governed syntactically by them.
The morphologically simplex verb, xotet', shows a wide range of lexical senses; (1) the sense of person-internal want, (2) the sense of 'attempted' want, (3) the deontic modal sense of 'permission', and (4) (colloquially) the sense of epistemic possibility. In contrast, the prefixed verb, zaxotet', is very restricted in its usage, its only lexical sense appearing person-internal want, which means that the two volition verbs could be examined with respect to 'aspectual' relationship, only when xotet' is used as expressing person-internal want. In other words, xotet' used in the sense of (2), (3), and (4) is a imperfectiva tantum verb. In this respect, the pair, xotet' and zaxotet', belong to those pairs of verbs, which show 'partial correlation (chastichnaja sootnositel'nost')'.
The study argues that the perfective zaxotet' is one of the 'inceptive' verbs, which is thus related with the imperfective xotet' procedurally. However, in the specific context, zaxotet' shows some aspectually-related functions of the perfective verb that constitutes a purely aspectual pair. This makes one to assume that zaxotet' is one of those verbs which illustrate the phenomenon of 'aspectualization of procedurals'.
From the lexico-semantic argument to the effect that the positive volition verb of xotet' triggers as a rule the perfective in the infinitival complent, while in the negative context the imperfective is preferred, it follows that markedness relation can be established in the context of volitive modal verb ; i. e., in the positive context, the perfective is unmarked, while in the negative context, the imperfective is unmarked. This is confirmed by the statistical analysis of the extensive data available to the author. This markedness relation, however, can be reversed in some specifiable contexts. Thus, the appearance of the marked member-the imperfective-in the positive context is induced by some semantic and discourse-pragmatic factors such as the generality of the infinitive situation, the replication of the previous utterance, and the exigency of the infinitive situation. The perfective, which is marked in the negative context, is motivated by the meaning of the subject-referent's strong will not to perform the infinitive action.