6

Mood, tense, and aspect

6.1 States and change, times, alternatives

All predicates report histories -- narratives, scenes, hopes, orders -- as do the predicates in [1], which relate the narrative of a journey of the Aksakov family:

[1]D cthtlbyt pbvs 1799 ujlf ghbt[fkb<pf> vs d ue,thycrbq ujhjl Rfpfym. Vyt ,skj<if> djctvm ktn. Vjhjps cnjzkb<if> nhtcrexbt.

In the middle of winter in 1799 we arrived in the regional capital of Kazan. I was eight. There was crisp frost.

The stories or scenes are elaborated around some time and world (set of circumstances) that the speaker deems immediately relevant to the ongoing dialogue or narrative; it might be termed the c o n t e x t u a l t i m e - w o r l d or the c o n t e x t u a l o c c a s i o n .1 The contextual time-world can be localized in relation to the here-and-now of speech, and that is what the category of tense does. Thus in [1], the adverb phrase establishes a contextual occasion in the winter of 1799, which is prior to the time of speech (writing), and the verbs are all past tense.

The states reported by predicates can be static, as are the speaker’s age and the weather in [1], or the states can change, as does the location of the Aksakov family in [1]. The concern with change and possible change around the contextual time is aspect. As is well known, verbs in Russian can be classified into two moieties, perfective and imperfective, that differ by the kind of history they report (§6.4).

Predicates provide information not just about states of the actual world. They also invite comparison to alternatives, to what might have been or what might come to pass. In [2], the narrator, a young boy, describes more about the journey of [1]:

1In the spirit of Reichenbach 1947 (“reference time”), Smith 1983, 1991 (“viewpoint”), Declerck 1991 (“orientation time”), Klein 1992, 1995, Paducheva 1996 (“time of report”). On limitations of the approach of Reichenbach, see Comrie 1981, Timberlake 1985[a].

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