Meaning components in the constitution of Russian verbs: Presuppositions or implicatures?

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the inferences triggered by perfective accomplishments and two verbal prefixes (the completive prefix do- and the iterative prefix pere-) in Russian. Contrary to most works that attempt to analyze those inferences as presuppositions, we show that there is no ground for such a claim and argue that the inferences discussed here are better analyzed in terms of entailments and scalar implicatures. We use standard tests from the previous research on semantic and pragmatic presupposition. For those cases where the standard tests prove to be insufficient, the empirical data from the questionnaire we conducted is provided. The methodology used to construct the questionnaire is based on the results of an empirical study by Chemla (2009).