Russian Prefixed Verbs of Motion Revisited

Although the analysis of Russian imperfective verbs like заходить ‘to go in <somewhere>’ as formed by adding a prefix to the non-directional verb ходить had been rejected as far back as in 1927 by Serguei Karcevski, then discussed in detail and definitely refuted in Isačenko (1960, 1962) it does not cease to reappear. The paper demonstrates that prefixed verbs of motion in modern Russian constitute a strict system, which rigorously observes the following three principles: perfectivization as an unqualified effect of prefixation; opposition of two types of meanings, based on the concepts of directional and non-directional motion, which persists in all derivative forms; imperfectivization (by various morphological means) as the way of forming an aspectual pair.