Adjuncts, attitudes and aspect: Some additions to a tense theory for Russian

Abstract

Compared to other languages, the temporal organisation in Russian relative clauses and temporal adverbial clauses is as simple as it can possibly be: The tense morphology is licensed locally and the adjunct tense and matrix tense are independent of each other. It is tempting to give a purely deictic analysis of adjunct tense in Russian. However, there are some exceptions to the deictic story, the most important one being adjunct tense embedded under attitudes and modals. For these cases, we argue that the highest tense in the adjunct is anaphoric (Tpro). We show that our previous analyses of complement tense and adjunct tense can be combined to successfully treat adjuncts in such intensional contexts. Furthermore, we discuss some residual issues in our tense theory for Russian, such as the insertion of covert tenses at LF (Russian lacks overt perfect tenses) and the integration of aspect in our system of feature transmission via semantic binding.