Reverse temporal interpretations in Slavic: towards an analysis
Antonio Civardi
May 2023 

The temporal/aspectual systems of most Slavic languages have the peculiar feature of allowing, for restricted sets of verbs and in contextually salient environments, a ‘reverse’ temporal interpretation, i.e. a past-inflected verb (nota bene: in matrix clauses, not in subordinate ones because of a Sequence-of-Tense rule) can be interpreted as having future reference, and vice-versa. Typical examples of future-oriented readings of past tense forms include Russian expressions like poexali (lit. ‘[we] went/left’ but interpreted as ‘let’s go’ or ‘we are going’) and the so-called ‘future aorist’ in Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian and in Macedonian. Conversely, in Russian and Polish – and arguably also in other Slavic languages – a future-marked form (the perfective present) can get a past reading when the setting is clearly situated before the speech time. Although the conditions that are required to allow such ‘reverse’ interpretations of Tense are different across the Slavic languages and are generally far from clear, the trigger for the reversal unquestionably lies in pragmatics and in the discourse environment. On these bases this paper will offer a very preliminary analysis of tense morphology in Slavic and it will be argued that, in neo-Reichenbachian terms, it only partially contributes to the relation between the E(vent) time and the R(eference) time, whereas the relation between R and the S(peech) time is essentially introduced in morphosyntax as a free variable that gets bound later, in dependance to discourse and pragmatics.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008120 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Forthcoming in Broccias, Cristiano, Annalisa Baicchi & Sara Dickinson (eds.). Dalla forma alla società: studi linguistici e culturali. Genova: Genova University Press
keywords:	syntax, semantics, pragmatics; tense, slavic languages, relevance theory; syntax-semantics interface
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