Tense and aspect of verbs of speech and perception in Russian narrative texts of 19–21 cent.

The paper explores conditions determining the choice of tense and aspect of the verbs of speech and perception in literary fiction. Special attention is paid to the frame verbs otvechat’/otvetit’, pisat’/napisat’ in Russian narrative texts of the nineteenth- through the twenty-first centuries. Their aspectual characteristics are analyzed in connection with lexical semantics, text position, and author`s tactics (focus on the action or mental perception).