Towards the problem of the so called «compound future II» semantics in the Old Russian language (on the material of the Life of St. Andrew the Fool)


2014. № 1 (27), 150-184

Yana A. Penkova, Vinogradov Institute of Russian Language, RAS

Abstract:

The paper deals with an analysis of semantic and syntactic peculiarities of the budet + l-form construction in the Life of the St. Andrew the Fool. The usage of the construction in question in this manuscript doesn’t coincide with what is typical for the majority of Old Russian texts, original or translated, so that it allows us to delineate three uses of the budet + l-form construction and to conclude that the latter was not restricted to conditional clauses, but could be used more widely: not only as a reference to any time earlier than some future moment, but also as a marker of pure resultativity in the future or even as a marker of supposition. Obviously, budet + l-form construction wasn’t just a relative future form, but rather a perfect form which could acquire modal and evidential semantic components.