Несовершенный вид и сукцессивность. К вопросу о нетривиальных контекстах в русском языке в плане прошлого

Abstract

Nadezhda Zorikhina Nilsson: The Imperfective in Sequences of Events. On Nontrivial Aspectual Contexts in Russian in the PastThis article analyses a nontrivial use of the Russian imperfective aspect in sequences of events in the past. The use of this so-called “contextually-conditioned imperfective past” (Dickey 2000) is characteristic of West Slavic languages, particularly Czech and Slovak, but in the linguistic literature several cases of its use in Modern Russian have also been identified.Based on data from the Russian National Corpus, this article presents the first investigation of the range of use of this phenomenon in Modern Russian.The article claims that, in spite of the extreme rarity of the imperfective aspect in the contexts under analysis, evidence for it may be found not only in stylistically marked contexts, but in common narrative style as well.Two types of contexts are investigated in detail: a chain of events consisting of more than two verbs, and the coordinative structure, where the second verb is an imperfective one. In the first case, the occurrence of the imperfective verb can be partly explained by the communicative inappropriateness of the perfective delimitative in these contexts, and in the second case the imperfective aspect may occur due to the lack of a sharp boundary between the two actions.