Српскохрватски глаголски облици за исказивање појава које постоје у садашњости

Abstract

The aim of this paper is (a) to determine what type of fact or situation, and under what conditions, can be interpreted as simultaneous with the time of speech, and (b) to assertain the principles which regulate the use of verbal forms for the expression of the present as opposed to the past and the futur. The annalysis is primarily concerned with the use of verbal forms by native speakers of standard Serbo-Croatian from Belgrade. It is shown that the following six types of present fact or situation have to be distinguished: (1) an event which occurs in space; (2) the possibility of such an event; (3) the occurrence of an inner impulse to action, not sub ject to voluntary control; (4) a state which is not interpreted as the direct result of a previous event; (5) a state which is interpreted in this manner; (6) a state of affairs involving the existence of an object or objects denoted by common nouns. When (1) is concerned, the imperfective present tense forms express the present, and the perfect and future tense forms the past and the future respectively. With (2), the present tense occurs in both aspec tual versions, while past possibilities are denoted either by the perfective perfect tense forms or by specific conditional forms (in both aspectual ver sions). In the case of (3), (4) and (5), the present may be expressed either by the imperfective present tense or by the perfective perfect tense. If the perfective perfect has been chosen to express the present, the corresponding past tense form is the pluperfect. In fact, whenever some form other than the imperfective present tense has been used to denote the present, the past has to be signalized in a rather specific way (the same, however, does not hold for the future, which is always denoted by the future tense).