Critical remarks on the distributive aktionsart

The goal of this paper is to propose an analysis of the structure of verb stems containing distributive prefixes po- and pere- in Russian. The paper argues that despite semantic similarities, the prefixes are radically different morphosyntacitcally. The distributive pere- is a selectionally restricted superlexical prefix [Tatevosov 2009] that requires a stem it combines with to be formally imperfective. The distributive po- is a left-peripheral prefix: its position is determined relative to the position of the secondary imperfective morpheme -yva-. Unlike pere-, po- imposes no selectional restriction on the stem. The concluding section of the paper discusses wider implications of the proposed analysis for a theory of Aktionsarten in Russian