The Irrealis Use of the Deictic TAM in Contemporary Russian

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis work seeks to establish the role that the Russian deictic TAM ‘there’ plays in conveying irrealis. TAM has attracted some attention among linguists because of its frequency of occurrence and polyfunctionality. To our knowledge, however, there has been no mention of TAM as described in the present paper. The study explores the semantic and pragmatic features of TAM and argues that this deictic is licensed primarily in irrealis environments (i. e. contrary-to-fact and hypothetical situations, unrealized or future events, negation, commands etc.). This licensing requirement also provides an explanation for other functions of TAM, such as vague approximator, marker of continuation and enumeration, disjunctive connective, marker of indefinite reference and evidential. In a cross-linguistic perspective, the set of functions performed by TAM seems similar to the semantic network developed by several irrealis markers in various languages and echoes the use of deictic spatial morphemes to mark irrealis and future contexts.