Description
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In Chapter 5 we look at simplex verbs that have two or more Natural Perfectives formed by attaching prefixes. When a simplex verb uses more than one prefix to form Natural Perfectives, we call this “prefix variation”. For example if you look up грузить/ gruzit’ ‘load’ in the Ožegov & Švedova (2001) dictionary, you find that it uses three prefixes, za-, na-, and po-, to form perfective partner verbs. Is this just an exception? The answer to this question has long been buried in hundreds of entries scattered across the pages of dictionaries. Fortunately the Exploring Emptiness database (henceforth “EE database”) makes this information easy to access. The information cited on this webpage is extracted from the EE database. It is reasonable to suspect that some prefix combinations are fairly common, while others will be less common or non-existent. This is indeed the case. Table below lists all possible binary prefix combinations with the number of the simplex verbs that use it. Theoretically it is possible to make 120 binary combinations of sixteen prefixes (120 = 16x15/2). There are thirty-one binary combinations that are used by three or more simplex verbs, twenty-three that are rare and sixty-six that are not found at all. |