ABSTRACT
In the Russian language, verbs are divided into two large aspectual classes - perfective and imperfective. A biaspectual verb can be thought of as a specific form of an aspectual pair containing two homophonous verbs having largely intersecting sets of forms. There is no generally accepted method for establishing whether a verb is more imperfective- or perfective-like. One might resort to the manual annotation of corpus examples for these verbs. However, this procedure would be extremely painstaking, since the verbs are numerous and some contexts turn out to be ambiguous and difficult to classify. The majority of forms of Russian imperfective and perfective verbs are formed in the same way. The only distinctions concern future tense, participle, and gerund formation. Comparing frequencies of the imperfective and the perfective gerund can be a good indicator of whether a biaspectual verb tends to behave more like an imperfective or a perfective verb.
