General Syntactic Meanings of Aspect-Tense Forms

Abstract

Alongsid a critical review, the article presents different approaches to the question of investigating the uses and meanings of verbal tense forms in the Slavic languages. The greater part of the paper is devoted to the functional investigation of aspect-temporal relations which, according to the author, transcend (both theoretically and in practice) the well-known »theory of indicatives and relatives«. The article lays special stress on the need to approach the Slavic use of tenses differently than one approaches the uses of tenses in Western European languages that are characterized by the concordance of tenses. This is so because Slavic languages are characterized by an opposite phonomena, namely, the nonconcordance of tenses which is primarily onditioned by the existence of aspetual opposition, that i, by the exitance of lexically and grammatically expresed categories of completeness and incompleteness of verbal action. The author emphasizes that if verbal forms in Slavic languages have tense or modal meanings, will depend both on the lexical and syntactic connectability of words and on the ability of verbal aspecct to influence the choice (demaration) of usage of these forms.