Russian aspectual pairs: Semantic theory and Maslov’s Сriterion

It is well known that in Maslovian contexts Russian imperfective verbs denote events but not lasting processes. My goal is to explain this fact in terms of semantics. By definition, verbs in an aspectual pair have the same lexical meaning, so we can consider that the semantic component ‘event’ is a part of lexical meaning of both verbs in an aspectual pair. Thus, the grammatical meaning of perfective vs. imperfective verb is confined to modal and temporal characteristics of the denoted event and process. Different types of verbs are described.