9 - Present Events: The Interactions of Verbal Aspect and Non-Past Tense in Early Church Slavonic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2021
Summary
Anni tui dies unus, et dies tuus non cotidie sed hodie, quia hodiernus tuus non cedit crastino; neque enim succedit hesterino.
(Sancti Augustini Confessiones, xi.16)
Users of Slavonic languages, and arguably of Old Church Slavonic, have in certain circumstances the luxury of a choice between two types of present tense. The distinction between them is contingent on a system of aspectual contrasts different from those found in western European languages. Verbal aspect in the Slavonic languages:
• involves a semantic contrast between a situation, characterized as a state or as ongoing activity (imperfective), and a situation-changing event (perfective);
• applies to each verb, which has the same aspect in all its forms irrespective of tense and mood;
• may be formally unmarked, implicit in verbal meaning, but more often is associated with derivational morphology of three kinds:
i. prefixation, which may produce (a) perfective lexical derivatives; (b) perfective Aktionsarten; (c) pure perfectives; (d) imperfective lexical derivatives; (e) in Czech and some varieties of Serbian or Croatian, future forms of imperfective verbs;
ii. suffixation, productive of perfectives but also found in imperfectives;
iii. suffixation, productive of secondary imperfectives derived from perfective lexical derivatives and Aktionsarten. This is the most reliable morphological indicator of aspect. A secondary imperfective may denote a situation in which the action expressed by the related perfective (a) occurs repeatedly, or (b) is presented as ongoing activity, or (c) is conveyed in the historic present.
• is predictably imperfective in verbs governed by phasals.
• tends to be correlated with tense, but not entirely predictably. In particular:
i. the non-past imperfective is required for the immediate present of the moment of speech, and tends to be used as an iterative and for the historic present; but it may compete with the non-past perfective in the latter two functions;
ii. the non-past perfective is mostly specialized to future use in West and East Slavonic languages, where it contrasts with a periphrastic imperfective future; but it is also used as an historic present, especially in Czech and in South Slavonic Croatian, Serbian and Slovene, and more generally as a non-actual present in the South Slavonic languages, where a different periphrastic future admits both aspects.
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- Medieval TemporalitiesThe Experience of Time in Medieval Europe, pp. 159 - 182Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021