Slavic-style aspects

The paper explores parameters of cross-linguistic variation across aspectual systems of the languages commonly subsumed under the label of “Slavic-style aspect”. I argue that despite striking superficial parallelism between Slavic (specifically, Russian) and Ossetian aspectual structure, the two are construed in considerably different ways. The key difference, which is the main focus of this paper, is that a result state description is integrated into the event structure by distinct mechanisms. In Russian, it has to be part of the denotation of the grammatical element spelled out by the prefix. In Ossetian, it comes out as part of the denotation of the verb stem itself. As a consequence, Ossetian resultative prefixes receive a presuppositional analysis: they apply to an eventuality description and check if this description is quantized.