Prefix variation as a challenge to Russian aspectual pairs: are завязнуть and увязнуть ‘get stuck’ the same or different?
Two key issues in Russian linguistics are the traditional assumptions that (a) the aspect system presents ‘pairs’ of verbs that are perfective vs. imperfective, and that (b) since the lexical meanings of the two verbs that form a pair are identical, the affix that marks aspect has no semantic content. In relation to prefixed perfectives, this approach can be called the Empty Prefix Hypothesis. The alternative approach, which can be called the Overlap Hypothesis, suggests that semantic emptiness is an illusion created by an overlap in the meanings of the base verb and the prefix. A long-standing debate over these two hypotheses remains unresolved. We address this debate via a phenomenon that has not previously been investigated in a thorough manner, namely prefix variation. Prefix variation is present when an imperfective base verb forms two or more aspectual partner verbs with the same lexical meaning, as illustrated by the two verbs завязнуть and увязнуть in our title. We present a detailed empirical analysis, showing that prefix variation is both frequent and systematic in Russian, and that our results support the Overlap Hypothesis.