Verbal Aspect: Scale or Continuum?

This work explores the behavior of verbal aspect in Russian. Traditionally, verbal aspect in Russian is considered a discrete category assuming two values: imperfective and perfective. Many difficulties arise from this binary classification of verbs with regard to their aspect. For example, some verbs cannot be attributed to any of these two classes, whereas other verbs possess characteristics of both perfective and imperfective aspect. I show that aspect is actually more fine-grained, and the binary classification of verbs does not imply that all verbs belonging to one aspect behave uniformly. I use the data-driven approach and draw material from the Russian National Corpus. I analyze the data with statistical methods (namely, multiple correspondence analysis, principle components analysis, distributional semantics) to reveal trends and categorize verbs according to their behavior.