Categorie semantico-funzionali del futuro russo

The Russian future tense has three semantic components (temporal, modal, and aspectual), which is why studies on this topic tend to emphasize an asymmetry within the Russian tense system. As a matter of fact, according to some linguists, there is one sole opposition in Russian: that between the past and present tenses. In the present work, the author expounds the attempts made by linguists to resolve this asymmetry, and distinguishes between Bondarko’s semantic functional formulation (1971) and the typological and contrastive studies which are peculiar to the Western linguistic tradition. She subsequently shows how the results of a typological-contrastive approach and the use of the conceptual apparatus developed so far within studies on modality and aspect, can help explain the semantic value of the future tense markers in Russian, particularly those of the present-future perfective aspect. In the part devoted to the analysis of a corpus of examples drawn from the Russian grammatical tradition, the future tense markers are considered as an amalgam and it is pointed out how their potential values are activated in precise communicative co-texts and contexts. This has led to a redefinition of the reciprocal relation among the semantic categories which are transmitted by the future (tense, aspect, and modality), underlining the rich polysemy of these verbal markers.