Looking into the Russian future

Abstract

The relationship between future time and future tense forms in Russian is complex. The forms traditionally attributed to the future tense in certain cases do not refer to future time. Those cases have been previously presented as an inventory not representing a plausible cognitive model and/or attributed to the sphere of modality. In this article, we suggest a data-driven approach applied to the spectrum of meanings of Russian future tense forms. We analyzed corpus data and discovered that 44% of perfective future forms and 22% of imperfective future forms do not unambiguously express future time meaning. Among the non-future time meanings that Russian future tense forms can express are Gnomic, Performative, Implicative, Hypothetical, Alternation, and Stable scenario. Furthermore, we propose that the meanings of the future tense constitute a radial category. Future time reference is the prototypical meaning of the future tense. The remaining meanings comprise extensions connected to the prototypical meaning. We describe the radial category with reference to Langacker’s (2008) model of tense and potentiality. Additionally, we explore the interaction of future tense and modality.