Tense and Aspect in Slavonic Languages : A Study in Text Linguistics

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The purpose of this study is to examine how the systems of tense and aspect came into existence and developed in Slavonic languages in the early periods of their history from the viewpoint of text linguistics.This study is based on the analysis of three kinds of fundamental data : (1) Old Church Slavonic Gospels, (2) Old Russian chronicles, (3) Two Slavic hagiographies, namely The Life of St. Cyril and The Life of St. Methodius.In the first year of our research project we carried out the study on the basis of the data of (1) and (2). We examined closely the text of Greek Gospels and their Old Church Slavonic translation and compared strictly uses of tense and aspect forms of verbs. We studied also two most important old Russian chronicles, namely The Russian Primary Chronicle (Povest' vremennykh let) and The First Novgorod Chronicle (Synodal copy), and tried to define the correlation between structures of the text and linguistic features of two chronicles from the viewpoint of the development of the Russian literary language.In the second year of our research project we studied the third kind of data, namely The Life of St. Cyril and The Life of St. Methodius. We read some of the texts of detailed and abridged versions of these two hagiographies and classified verbal forms according to their uses. As a result of this, we made some interesting observations on the use of the perfect that was limited in number in Old Church Slavonic Gospels as well as in Old Russian chronicles. The study of the whole systems of tense and aspect of mediaeval Slavonic languages is, however, now in progress and requires more examination.