The syntactic representation of perfectivity

In Russian, optionally transitive verbs become obligatorily transitive with the addition of a lexical perfective prefix. This paper gives a Distributed Morphology approach to this problem. It argues that the Roots that underlie these verbs introduce no argument; in the imperfective case, the object is introduced by the verbalizing head, while in the perfective case, the object is introduced by the perfective prefix itself. The perfective prefix combines with the Root before it combines with the verbalizing head to create an altered Root that is interpreted as a state and introduces an internal argument. The analysis is then extended to explain some interesting asymmetries between imperfective and perfective verbs with passive participles and negation.