‘Now’ in Russian: a Corpus-Based Approach to Teper’ and Sejčas

Abstract

The Russian adverbs teper' and sejčas, which can both be translated as 'now' (at least in some contexts), can be seen as typical examples of near synonymous forms. The aim of this paper is to provide a corpus-based analysis of the meanings of these forms, which takes as its starting point the existing analyses, especially Mel'cǔk (1985). The paper has the following structure. In section 1.1 we introduce the relevant theoretical notions for the study of teper' and sejčas, in section 1.2 we present Mel'cǔk's (1985) analysis, and in section 1.3 we formulate our research questions. Section 2 contains our quantitative analysis of teper' and sejčas and in section 3 the qualitative analysis is given. Section 4 provides the conclusion of our paper. 1.1Relevant Notions In this section we will introduce some relevant notions for the study of the semantics of teper' and sejčas, which are necessary for the analysis: -the timespan to which 'now' refers (the time of 'now') -the situation that is associated with 'now' -the time of assertion -the moment of speech (time of utterance) of the sentence containing 'now' -the moment of reference of 'now' We will illustrate these notions with some English examples, before discussing the Russian data. Consider the following sentence containing now:1 We would like to thank Marieke Droogsma and Tomas Busser for their help with the analysis and tagging of the data, and the anonymous reviewer for his/her valuable comments. We are also very grateful to Tore Nesset for providing us with the data from his research on teper' and sejčas. Finally, we are extremely thankful to Igor Mel'čuk who critically read our paper and made several useful comments. All remaining errors are of course our own. The Russian example sentences given in this paper are taken (unless indicated otherwise) from the Russian National Corpus (RNC), and the English example sentences are taken (unless indicated otherwise) from the British National Corpus (BNC).