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Slovo.
Journal of Slavic Languages and Literatures
My Russian informants 17 confirm that the English translation in this case is misleading
with the quantifier “always”, suggesting a habitual interpretation, while the Russian
original should rather be interpreted as reporting on more or less accidental event
plurality. A search in the monolingual Russian National Corpus provides several
examples with the present (perfective or imperfective) under byvalo, čto:
(57) Переезд на подводах практиковался в радиусе до 40 верст, с расчетом,
чтобы подвода к вечеру могла добраться до дачи. Бывало[up, uipf], что
дачники приедут[un, upf], а подводы нет, спать не на чем. (Russian
National Corpus)
The same mechanism that is responsible for the present tense under byvalo should also
explain the present tense under byvalo, čto in examples such as (54) and (57). This
raises the question: Do we find SOT effects with implicatives in SOT languages?
Indeed, we do find such data. In fact, we also run into some (more or less familiar)
problems for SOT theories. Consider the English (or Norwegian) construction below:
(58) Но в тридцатилетней практике бухгалтера не было случая, чтобы ктонибудь,
будь то юридическое или частное лицо, затруднялся бы принять
деньги. (Michail Bulgakov, “Master i Margarita”)
(59) But there had[up] been no case in the bookkeeper’s thirty years of experience
when anyone, either an official or a private person, had[up] had a difficult
time accepting money.
(60) Men i hele bokholderens tredveårige praksis var[up] det ikke en eneste gang
forekommet at en person, den være seg juridisk eller fysisk, hadde[up] vegret
seg for å motta penger. (Norwegian)
We can safely consider “to be the case…” a verbal quantifier with an “implicative”
semantics (if it is true that “it is the case that P”, then P is obviously also true). The
past tense on “had [up] had a difficult time” in the subordinate when-clause can be
analysed as a case of tense agreement with the matrix past. However, there is no
semantic justification for the presence of the verbal quantifier had in the when-clause
(there is no backward shifted interpretation). Thus, although we can explain the
morphological features of had, we cannot explain the presence of the quantifier itself.
This problem, however, is also found in many other environments, such as in if-clauses
under a past counterfactual operator:
(61) Как бы он обрадовался, если бы узнал об этом! (Jurij Oleša, “Tri tolstjaka”)
(62) How happy he would[up] have been if he had[up] known!
(63) Så glad han ville[up] blitt om han hadde[up] visst det! (Norwegian)
The “have” in the main clause is semantically a past time shifter locating the
counterfactual hypothesis in the past. The past tense morphology on the counterfactual
operator “would” as well as in “had” in the if-clause is so-called fake past, i.e. pastpro-subjunctive
mood. As in the previous example, there is no semantic motivation for
17 I thank Olga Dolžikova, Svetlana Krasikova and Tatiana Nikitina for discussion of the Russian data.
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