Russian adverb davno ‘long ago’ and aspectual verb forms: spoken corpora data

Twenty years ago, it was hypothesized that in the context of the aspectual forms of Russian verbs relating to past events and having no reference to the real results of action at the moment of speech the adverb davno ‘long ago’ is the rheme. As a canonical context to refer to the past the general factual meaning of the Russian imperfective aspect was singled out. Presently, the new sound corpora give an opportunity to verify this hypothesis on extensive and real material. Since the prosody of oral speech is the main means of expressing the communicative structure as a whole and the rheme in particular, it can open the access to the communicative structure. The prosodical analysis of the spoken sentences with davno has on the whole verified the main hypothesis, but some interesting specifications have also appeared. It has been demonstrated that in sentences with negation and in sentences with verbs of speech in the general factual meaning, the state of things that arose long ago may keep up to the point of reference (moment of speech). This, therefore, does not obligatorily demand davno to be the rheme. In contrary to what was meant before, davno in composition with the general factual meaning of the imperfective case is not an absolute condition for davno to function as the rheme.