Aspect and reference time

ing away from the intermediate levels in (28), focus on the edges of this scheme: from the diachronic perspective, the hypothesis that the original resultative meaning of present perfect in Old Russian transformed into the meaning of simple past is theoretically well founded and supported by the data. In modern Russian, there are no other past forms available than the ‘leftovers’ of what used to be present (or past) perfect: the –l-participles. This also explains why, although they function as full-fledged past forms semantically, they still exhibit the participial agreement pattern: the past tense forms in modern Russian agree with the subject of a sentence in number and, if the number is singular, in gender. There is no person agreement feature in the past tense in Russian, the auxiliary that used to bear this feature disappeared. Along with the auxiliary, the connection to the S-time and the resultative meaning of the former present perfect vanished as well. Having explained the history of the past tense forms from Table V.1, I will now turn to the non-past tense forms in Russian, in particular, the periphrastic forms, and try to explain their behaviour. V.2.2. The non-past forms As was illustrated in Table V.2, Old Russian had two periphrastic future forms, one with an infinitive (absolute future) and another one with a resultative –l-participle, traditionally called relative future in Russian historical grammars. The relative future forms used to express ‘past’ with respect to the other future (i.e., future anterior), and were derived by the auxiliary byti (‘to be’) and the past resultative –l-participle. The participle showed number-gender agreement and the auxiliary agreed with the subject of a sentence in person and number. The forms of the relative future were most often used in conditional if-clauses (Avanesov 1982:112): (29) Ože budetь ubilъ, platiti tako if be-pres.3sg PF-kill-RES.PRT-sg.masc. pay-INF so ‘If (one) kills somebody, this is the way one will pay for it’ The meaning of precedence with respect to another eventuality is logically related to the semantic contribution of the –l-participle. Gradually, the participle became so strongly associated with the pure past interpretation, that, consequently, the forms of relative future were sometimes used referring to the past, as was deduced from the contexts where these forms were used in written documents. According to the 13 Boogaart argues that the semantics of the result is always compatible with, but does not constitute the general meaning of the present perfect. This means that the resultative is a prominent, but not an exclusive meaning of the present perfect. Therefore, the denotation of ‘perfect’ in this scheme is wider than the denotation of ‘resultative’. Moreover, Boogaart ́s interpretation of the perfective differs from mine, this is why I do not want to consider the intermediate phases of (28). Russian aspect in terms of Reference time 151 documented evidence, these forms were no longer used in Russian after the 17 century. The second periphrastic form, which is referred to as ‘absolute future’ in Table V.2, has survived and is still used in modern Russian. The only difference is that in Old Russian, it was possible to use more auxiliary verbs to derive these forms: (30) xočetь / počnetь / imatь / budetь vedati want-pres.3sg / begin-pres.3sg / have-pres.3sg / be-pres.3sg know-INF Later, all these verbs except for byt’/byti ‘be’, developed their own lexical meanings and were not used in the process of tense formation anymore. The auxiliary verb byti is what I want to focus on here. There is some diachronic evidence that the forms of byt’ (‘to be’) that are used in the periphrastic non-past tense in modern Russian used to be perfective. Modern Russian does not provide any evidence for classifying these forms as aspectually perfective. However, the future interpretation of periphrastic tense forms is fully determined by the auxiliary verb. If these forms of auxiliary were perfective in Old Russian, then their interpretation patterns with the interpretation of other perfectives in non-past: the combination of the perfective aspect and a non-past tense always leads to the future interpretation. It has been argued that historically, the forms with the stem budof byt’ ‘be’ used to be perfectives (Junghanns 1997, van Schooneveld 1951). Compare the full paradigm of byti, the Old Russian ‘be’, in (31) with a quite deficient paradigm of its modern counterpart in (32): (31) present tense of byti ‘to be’ in Old Russian: imperfective perfective sg pl dual sg pl dual 1st esmь esmъ esvě budu budemъ budevě 2nd esi este esta budeši budete budeta 3rd estь sutь esta budetь budutъ budeta As this table illustrates, byti ‘be’ in Old Russian, as any other verb, had both perfective and imperfective forms. In modern Russian, we find the following system: 14 However, they still exist in some other Slavic languages, e.g., Polish, although apparently they totally lost the ‘relative’ (with respect to another future eventuality) part of the meaning and just refer to future. 15 I will provide an explanation for this phenomenon in V.3.4.