On the status of verbal aspect in Russian: A lexicographer’s view

The goal of the paper is to propose a new format of representation of Russian aspectual pairs in an explanatory dictionary. Two issues are being considered: the choice of the representative of an aspectual pair (i.e. the verb in a given pair which gets full lexicographic description in contrast to the other verb, which has just a reference to the former); and the representation of a polysemic aspectual pair. The proposed format satisfi es both the aspectological theory and modern requirements to explication of lexical meaning. New semantic arguments are formulated for understanding the nature (inflectional vs. derivational) of Russian verbal aspect.