The phrase structure of phase verbs: An initial contrastive analysis of English and Russian

Abstract

This squib carries out an initial contrastive analysis of English and Russian phase (a.k.a. aspectual) verbs. Following Fukuda’s (2008; 2009) syntactic account of English, I assume English phase verbs can head one of two aspectual functional projections: H-AspP, located immediately above vP; or L-AspP, located between vP and VP. Applying the same diagnostics to Russian, it appears that Russian phase verbs head only L-AspP. The relation between L-AspP and another structurally similar aspectual projection, AspP, proposed by Mac- Donald (2008a;b), is discussed. We see that L-AspP has a subset of the aspectual properties of AspP. Finally, I note how this approach to Russian phase verbs leads to the expectation that semantic properties of Russian phase verb complements play a role in some of the phase verb complement (in)compatibility patterns. In concrete, I suggest that the aspectual class of the complement plays a role.