Sequence of tenses in Russian revisited: Corpus study of tense distribution patterns in complement clauses

The study examines tense variation in complement and subject clauses subordinate to and co-temporal with matrix past tense verbs in Russian. The semantics of the matrix verb is commonly named as one of the major factors that govern tense choice in complement and subject clauses: verbs of speech
are said to exclusively license present tense in embedded clauses; existential verbs, on the other hand, are said to block present tense; whereas verbs of perception are said to allow both past and present tense, cf. Vanja skazal, čto Maša xorošo vygljadit ‘Vanya said that Masha looked [pres] great’ vs. Slučalos’,
čto Maša vygljadela xorošo ‘It happened (there were times) that Masha looked [past] great’ vs. Vanja videl, čto Maša xorošo vygljadit / vygljadela ‘Vanya saw that Masha looked [pres/past] great’. However, despite a considerable body of research on the topic, a comprehensive investigation of tense distribution
across various semantic classes of matrix verbs has not yet been undertaken. This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of tense distribution in complement and subject clauses across five semantic classes of the matrix verb: speech, mental, emotion, perception, and existential. Statistical analysis revealed the following probabilistic hierarchy of licensing past tense: existential verbs (97 %) > verbs of perception + complementizer kak (70 %) > verbs of perception + complementizer čto (41 %) > mental verbs (9 %) > verbs of speech (1 %). This hierarchy rectifies our notion of tense choice in complement
and subject clauses in Russian. It is also notable for its high correspondence with the interclausal bondedness hierarchy maintained in typological studies. The suggested isomorphism of the two hierarchies implies that tense appears to be a probabilistic marker of interclausal bondedness, with the absolute
tense encoding closer and the relative looser relations.