SEMANTICS OF THE SLAVIC FUTURE PERFECT AND SEVERAL TYPOLOGICAL PARALLELS

The article deals with the main temporal and modal functions of the Slavic future perfect, and reveals the evolutionary routes and their reasons, based on the material of old and modern Slavic languages, involving some similar typological phenomena of other European languages. The Slavic future perfect is polyfunctional. Anteriority in the future appears not as its invariant meaning, but only as one of its temporal functions. The author distinguishes three main functions: ‘anteriority in the future’, ‘posteriority in the future’ and ‘assumption about an event in the past’, as well as some isolated cases which show that the periphrasis can even enter the semantic area of irreality.The key role in the semantics and in the evolutionary routes of the Slavic future perfect belongs to conventionalized implicatures, which serve as a source for its polyfunctional character and determine its different routes of change in the history of Slavic languages. Two main evolutionary routes can be established. The first one is determined by the loss of the resultative function and by there interpretation of the future perfect as a non-resultative periphrastic future.This change is typical of theWest Slavic languages and the western part of the South Slavic languages and dialects: Old Czech, some Slovak dialects, Slovenian, north-western dialects of Serbo-Croatian and probably Polish. On the contrary, the eastern parts of the South Slavic languages and, to some extent, the East Slavic Languages, share the evolutionary route that leads to the development of modal and evidential meanings. It may subsequently cause there interpretation of the future perfect auxiliary as a presumptive marker and its expansion to other temporal structures (Bulg. shte(da), Russ. bude). The Russian language, in the later course of its history, loses the future perfect grammeme, as well as its relicts.