Dear Bryan,
Nice to hear from you again; I think it is about 7 years since we first time exchanged viewpoints regarding Hebrew verbs on this list.
Hopper gives the following example from Russian:
...Peasants returning from the city whipped (impfv.) their horses and rushed by (impfv.) in silence past these regualarly distributed figures with their highly felonious appearance. The soxoz managers and the authorities rumbled by (impfv.) on carts and demostrably showed (impfv.) the colonists their double-barrelled and sawed-off shotguns, while people on foot stopped (impfv.) at the bridge and waited (impfv.) for other travellers.
While I was around the colonists never misbehaved (impfv.) or bothered (impfv.) the travellers, but when I wasn't they allowed (impfv.) themselves some dirty tricks, so that soon Zadarov refused (pfv.) to take the revolver and demanded (pfv.) that I absolutely had to spend time out on the road. So I began (pfv.) to go out with every detachment, but still gave (impfv.) the revolver to Zadorov, so as not to deprive him of deserved pleasure.
Hopper's comment, "The habitual actions here do not come to an end with the event verbs 'refused', 'demanded', and 'began', but are thought of as on-going. The three perfective verbs, however, are sequenced among themselves, and in fact the morphological difference between perfective and imperfective is a clear signal that these, and only these, events are presented as sequenced, and that they are not sequenced with respect to the imperfective verbs."
p. 10 "Aspect Between Discourse and Grammar" from _Tense-Aspect: Between Semantics and Pragmatics_, ed. Hopper. Amsterdam/Phila.: John Benjamins, 1982.
I am very sceptical to Russian examples used to illuminate classical Hebrew, because what is called the imperfective and perfective aspects in Russian are more like Aktionsart than aspects. For example, "habituality" is not an aspectual quality in my definition of Hebrew aspects, but is a function of aspect + Aktionsart +possibly context. Peter Kirk may have more to say about this, because he knows both Russian and Hebrew.
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