Original version
Linguistic Investigations into Formal Description of Slavic Languages. 2007, 515-527
Abstract
In this paper, I argue both empirically and formally that we need an optional relative past in the semantics of the temporal system of Russian. I propose a temporal calculus which can effectively deal with relative past readings in Russian, including the interaction with temporal adverbials, without positing an unwelcome ambiguity of explicit markers of tense and aspect. Furthermore, I show that a relative past is, to a certain extent, independent of aspect and co-occurs also with imperfective aspect, pace Paslawska and von Stechow (2003). More specifically, the so-called factual Ipf clearly exhibits past perfect interpretations, although it does not freely allow interpolation of a relative past.