Russian adverbials with temporal meaning TOL’KO, TOL’KO-TOL’KO, and TOL’KO ČTO: Recent past meaning and resultative semantics.


2017. №1, 53-73

Alexander B. Letuchiy
National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation;
alexander.letuchiy@gmail.com

Abstract:

The paper describes Russian constructions with the markers of immediate past tol’ko, tol’ko-tol’ko, and tol’ko čto, such as On tol’ko / tol’ko-tol’ko / tol’ko čto prišel ‘He has just come’, and their relations with the resultative semantics. The main question posed in the article is whether the use of the three markers under analysis presupposes that the result of the situation persists at the moment of speech. I show that the meaning of immediate past does not necessarily correlate with the resultative meaning. The meaning of some immediate past constructions can contain the resultative component, while others lack it. In Russian, the markers tol’ko and tol’ko-tol’ko are tightly connected with the resultative meaning, while the marker tol’ko čto does not require either the presence or the absence of the result. The connection of tol’ko and tol’ko-tol’ko with resultative contexts follows from their semantics and discourse properties, which are also addressed in the paper.