SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF VERBAL ASPECTUALITY IN ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN DISCOURSES

Abstract

The relevance of the proposed article stems from the scientific interest in investigation of different means of conceptual organization of knowledge in the process of production and interpretation of English and Russian utterances. Thus, it aims at establishing the role of aspect in English and Russian discourse through interpreting aspectual situations which are analyzed at the level of sentences and textual fragments borrowed from two translation versions of M. Mitchell’ s novel “Gone with the Wind”.The theoretical framework for the research is provided by Relevance theory as developed in recent works on procedural meaning to handle H. Reichenbach’s symbolic logic for tense and aspect and Relevance theory proposed by D. Sperber and D. Wilson. We suggest that the following means are involved in expressing the type of action: a combination of lexical and grammatical properties of the verb; grammatical forms of the verb; meanings of time adverbs. These means are capable of characterizing R, a conceptual notion, which can be inferred by contextual assumptions.Systematization of referential relations among the above mentioned components taking into account the influence of pragmatic interpretive component and contextual analysis of informational organization of discourse proves the hypothesis that referential characteristics being combined contribute to the description of a discourse situation as stative, habitual, inchoative or punctual.The article will be interesting for researchers in contrastive and cognitive linguistics.