When Three is Company: The Relation Between Aspect and Metaphor in Russian Aspectual Triplets

Abstract

The focus of the present study is the relation between metaphor and aspect: are certain grammatical forms more prone to be used metaphorically? We approach this issue through a puzzling case of Russian aspectual triplets. The study is based on the distributions of the unprefixed imperfective verb gruzit’ (IPFV1) ‘load’, its perfective counterparts (PFVs) and prefixed secondary imperfectives (IPFV2s) with the prefixes na-, za-, and po-. The data collected from the Russian National Corpus offers support for the Telicity Hypothesis according to which IPFV2s become more “oriented towards a result” due to the presence of a prefix. We show that, although characterized by similar semantics, all verbs in a triplet have different distributions among constructions and metaphorical patterns. The difference is particularly noticeable in metaphorical contexts, where IPFV2s have a higher frequency of metaphorical uses. The prefix seems to play a more crucial role than aspect as metaphorical patterns of IPFV2s are more similar to the patterns attested for the perfective counterparts. Based on this study, we can assume that the resultative state more often serves as a source for conventional verbal metaphors than the process itself, which results in IPFV2s being more often used metaphorically than IPFV1.