ON THE SPECIAL USAGES OF THE FORMS OF AORIST AND ACTIVE PAST PARTICIPLE IN OLD RUSSIAN CHRONICLES

As it is known, the aorist is used in Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian writings as the main narrative tense. Potentially, the aorist might be formed from both perfective and imperfective verbs, as it is semantically neutral with regard to the character of the action. However, in reality, in Old Russian (as in Old Church Slavonic) writings, the aorist is mainly found with perfective verbs, while aorists of imperfective verbs are rare and, usually, need some contextual support or restrictions. The paper deals with one of these restrictions, attested in Old Russian manuscripts. The forms of the aorist (as well as the active past participles), formed from some simplexes (with imperfective meaning), occur in the contexts where the explicit reference to how long the action lasted is expressed (dolgo, mnogo, ves’ den’, mal chas, etc.). In Old Russian chronicles these forms are attested quite regularly. The article analyzes the manner in which such marginal tense forms, being in conflict with the aspectual meaning of the verb, were motivated and supported by certain lexical, grammatical and contextual factors. The paper also raises the question of the need for a more subtle approach to the contexts that might be demonstrative for the aspectual meaning of a verb. Thus, it was shown that the ability to form an active past participle, often regarded as a quite strong morphological criterion pointing to the perfective aspect, may not always be significant.