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The Use of General Factual Value in Russian and Bulgarian in Past and Future Tense The present paper is dedicated to the analysis of some contexts of use of general factual value in Russian and Bulgarian in past and future tense. The first part examines the three main types of general factual meaning in the past (‘referential’, ‘existential’ and ‘atelic’). We show that in Bulgarian these meanings are rendered by imperfective verbs in aorist, perfect, and imperfect tense respectively, while in Russian they are all rendered by a single form: the preterite of imperfect verbs. The second part of the paper analyzes the general factual meaning in future tense. As for Russian, the fact that the general factual reading of the analytical future has many restrictions with respect to the past is confirmed. On the contrary, in Bulgarian the general factual meaning turns out to be the main meaning of the imperfective future.

This article examines some mechanisms of mutual influence between various grammatical subsystems shaping the aspectual profile of Russian and Bulgarian utterances. Special attention is paid to three questions: a) on the semantic level, how the aspectual value of a verb is integrated into the structure of the utterance; b) on the syntactic level, how a given aspectual form interacts with other constituents of the clause, and c) on the discourse level, how the context contributes to the structuring and decoding of the aspectual features of the utterance. Such mechanisms become necessary when we deal with complex “hybrid” aspectual forms such as the Russian perfective present and the Bulgarian perfective imperfect. It is argued that some semantic features of a perfective verb, which are relevant to the aspectual value of the clause, are blocked in these forms under the influence of the context; the result is the emergence of aspectual values normally expressed by imperfective verb forms.

In this article, I examine the illocutionary potential of some directives in Russian and Bulgarian in terms of categories of politeness and interpersonal distance. I show that the interplay between tense and aspect parameters of Russian performative verb pair prosit′/poprosit′ and respective Bulgarian pair molja/pomolja serves a wide range of pragmatic functions. Compared with other directives the analyzed verbs can be considered pragmatically most intensive, as they assume a greater number of situations and contexts in which a management of the interpersonal distance between the interlocutors is necessary.

Bulgarian differs from the other Slavic languages in that performatives are used in a somewhat wider range of tense-aspectual forms than the (always imperfective) present, which is the classic form for performative utterances in general. In fact, performatives occur in the analytical future, both perfective and imperfective. This paper aims to identify the parameters determining tense-aspectual choices in performative verbs in Bulgarian and to highlight the pragmatic meaning of such choices. In particular, the paper puts forward the hypothesis that tense and aspect in Bulgarian performative utterances can perform specific functions related especially to interpersonal distance and linguistic politeness.