On the penetration of the perfect into the Russian narrative system

Abstract

The decline of the old narrative tenses, viz. the aorist and the imperfect, and the generalization of the perfect in the role of a preterite at their expense till their total extinction, are considered essential phenomena of the far-reaching evolution which the Russian verbal system underwent between the Xllth and the XVIth centuries (cf. Borkovskij-Kuznecov 1963, 277sq). This mutation, along with the advancement of the category of aspect which it favoured (Veyrenc 1970, 82), prepared the ground for the rise of the narrative system in its modern shape, i.e. a system with a single tense, dominated by the aspectual dichotomy. In order to examine closely this mutation we have chosen an extensive narrative corpus from the period of transition between Old and Middle Russian, viz. the Moskovskij letopisnyj svod konca 15-ogo veka2 . In this text the transformation of the narrative system is rather advanced, even though the aorist is still the best represented past tense. In fact, out of a total of ca. 16 600 occurrences, 80% are aorist, 8% are imperfect, and only 12% are perfect. Among the 2000 occurrences of the perfect we find examples for all its syntactic values, old and new. In order to display these values, it is necessary to etch out the historical development of the perfect in Old Russian starting from Old Church Slavonic. The usual definitions of the perfect normally underline its fundamentally adjectival character (van Schooneveld 1959, 15-16). The -/participle combined with the present of the auxiliary byti produces a complex form which refers to both the past and the present. Thus, for Andre Vaillant the perfect expresses "Faction passee envisagee du point de vue du present" (1964, 346). Another feature frequently noted is that of resultativity ("vyslednost", Dostal 1954, 601), i.e. a present state which results from a past action. But already in Old Church Slavonic the perfect is beginning to penetrate into the preterite accompanied by the decay of the other two past tenses. This naturally results in a progressive loss of its specificity vis-d-vis its two moribund rivals (Vaillant 1964, 254; Borkovskij 1949, 181). Istrina (1923, 123) distinguishes three major groups in the use of the perfect. Its most frequent use is in direct discourse, then in subordinate narrative clauses and finally in main clauses. We intend to show that these three groups correspond to the three stages which the perfect had to traverse on its way from being an "adjectival", "objectivizing" tense (van Schooneveld 1959, 94), to becoming the sole past tense, narrative as well as discursive. It is not at all surprising that the perfect, which in the opinion of grammarians had already become well entrenched in the spoken