Lexical Prefixation and Lexical Meaning

This article surveys two types of semantic interaction of lexical prefixes and verb stems in Russian, identified as compositional and non-compositional. As a result of non-compositional prefixation, a stem acquires eventualities that were not part of its denotation. This is manifested in the lack of entailment from sentences with prefixed verbs to sentences with their non-prefixed counterparts, which is the case for opisat’ ‘describe’, zakryt’ ‘close, shut’ and the like. In contrast, the denotation obtained by compositional prefixation only contains eventualities from the original denotation of a stem, even though not necessarily all such eventualities. This happens in case of podpisat’ ‘sign’, napisat’ ‘write down’, spisat’ ‘copy’, vypisat’ ‘write out’, etc. Compositional prefixation falls into two varieties. One is obtained if result states introduced by the prefix are compatible with any culminating eventualities described by the stem. In the previous literature, this case was designated as “purely aspectual” or “empty” prefixation, e.g., napisat’ ‘write down’. The second variety leads to strengthening of the meaning of a verb through narrowing down of the original denotation, as, e.g., with podpisat’ ‘sign’, vypisat’ ‘write out’ and similar verbs.