Elena Gorbova: Perfect Semantics in Russian and the Semantics of the Perfect in Spanish

The paper deals with the semantics of the Spanish perfect and its translation equivalents in Russian, employing data from parallel corpora. The analysis is performed against the background of typological views on the perfect as a cross-linguistic category. Along with the Spanish perfect, the semantics of its translation equivalents in Russian such as preterite finite forms (otkryl, napisal) and short-form passive participle constructions-(bylo) otkryto, napisano-are discussed as well. The analysis shows that Russian does not show any strong correlation between the perfect meaning on the whole and the use of perfective and imperfective aspects, although there is a strong tendency to express the experiential variant by the imperfective aspect. The perfect meaning is thus shared between the perfective and imperfective aspect clusters, and the general semantics of the perfect is best described as "current relevance"