Aspect system of Enets against the background of Russian: A case study of “classifying” viewpoint aspect.

The paper deals with the aspect system of Enets, a non-Slavic language with a “classifying” (derivational) viewpoint aspect distinguishing perfective and imperfective verbs. Since such aspect systems have so far been studied mainly in Slavic and some areally close languages, the aspect system of Enets is compared with the system of Russian, one of the most thoroughly described ones. Such a comparative study is a step towards revealing which well-known features of Russian aspect and Slavic aspect in general are languageand group-specific peculiarities and which of them are present in other classifying aspect systems. On the one hand, many aspects of the Enets system are found in Russian (using imperfective with adverbials of duration; using imperfective with phasal verbs; expressing completed events with imperfective verbs; type of aspectual composition). On the other hand, Enets has a significantly broader distribution of perfective verbs; this could be related to the fact that, in contrast to Russian, the major part of Enets underived verbs are perfective.