A Stranger in the Lexicon: The Aspectual Status of Russian смочь ‘be able, manage (to)’

Abstract

It has been claimed that Russian смочь ‘be able, manage (to)’ has a number of unusual properties relating to its expression of aspect and tense. A number of new kinds of data are brought to bear in this debate. This article compares смочь with its purported aspectual partner verb мочь using overall and longitudinal corpus data. It also compares the distribution of forms of смочь with those of other Russian verbs and report on an experiment in which native speakers of Russian rated the acceptability of past tense смог in contexts where мог is attested. In addition, parallel corpus data is used to compare forms of Russian смочь with their translation equivalents in both Czech and Spanish. Collectively this data shows that смочь is arguably the most deviant purportedly perfective verb in Russian, and that it has shown a dramatic increase in frequency over the past century. However, it is not easy to identify the cause of this increase, nor to find strong support for the hypothesis that this is due to the expansion of nonpast forms of смочь to contexts where it merely expresses futurity.