On the Encoder’s Perception of Occurrences

Abstract

This study focuses on the comparative analysis of verb tense meanings in Russian and Modern Hebrew. Despite belonging to different language families, both languages feature the past, present, and future tenses of the indicative mood[1], which may indicate a corresponding similarity in meanings. While these forms often objectively reflect real-time relationships, systematic discrepancies are observed between the meanings of verb tenses and their actual uses in each language. To address this, we propose invariant meanings for each tense that will underlie all its uses, including transposed ones. Based on the Columbia School sign-oriented linguistic framework (see Diver, 1981; 1995; García, 1975; Tobin, 1990a; 1995), we focus on verb tense usage in “Kolyma Tales” (“Kolymskie rasskazy”) by Varlam Šalamov (2013) and “Sumchi” by Amos Oz (1978), along with their literary translations into Hebrew (2005) and Russian (2015), respectively. On the one hand, we postulate that the tense systems of both languages share a common semantic content, which relates to the speaker’s or writer’s perception of actions, states, or events at the moment of speaking or writing. This explains the similarity in tense usage between original texts and their translations. On the other hand, differences in tense usage are more likely attributed to language-specific communicative strategies – standardized ways of combining invariant meanings to convey particular messages, as described within Columbia School theory. [1] While Russian has forms, traditionally categorized as perfective and imperfective verbs, and Hebrew possesses a so-called compound past tense expressing hypothetical or habitual actions in the past, these facts are beyond the scope of this paper.   [1] While Russian has verbs, categorized as perfective and imperfective, and Hebrew possesses a compound past tense expressing hypothetical or habitual actions in the past, these facts are beyond the scope of this paper.