Aspekt, tempus og Kærlighedens ø. Om narrativ progression i dansk og russisk

Resumé

The paper starts with a short introduction to the notion of verbal aspect, focusing on aspect in Russian. In particular it compares and contrasts the treatments of this subject by Carlota Smith and Per Durst-Andersen. This is followed by a discussion of grammatical tense in a Reichenbachian framework. Special emphasis is made on the application of the Reichenbachian analysis to narrative texts where the moment of speech by and large loses its relevance for the interpretation of the tense forms. Finally, the paper examines the time relations in a fragment of a Danish short story and its Russian translation. It is shown that Danish, which doesn’t have aspect as a grammatical category, unlike Russian needs lexical markers such as time adverbs and conjunctions in order to advance the narration, while on the other hand Russian with its only three tenses to a higher degree than Danish has to make use of lexical markers to indicate relative time.