Discourse Function of Aspect in Modern Russian: Ground Theory Revisited

Abstract

Study of Russian aspect has been mainly concentrated on the interpretive method" to establish the invariant meanings of aspect at morphosemantic level. This approach, however, is not very helpful to make clear objectively the intuitive cognition that aspect plays a certain role at discourse level. In this respect, the recent approach through Ground Theory made a considerable contribution. In this paper I discuss problems of Ground Theory and try to clarify that aspect and foreground/background are not directly related but indirectly through the fìltering of contextual meanings. For this purpose, I analyse the cases, where there are conflicts between contextual and prototypical meanings, i. e., the imperfective aspect in terminative" context, the perfective aspect in durative" and iterative" contexts