‘Here’ and ‘now’

P. 31–40.

Apresyan V.

While space-time metaphor is a source of regular prepositional and adverbial polysemy, in deixis, spatial words are generally not prone to evolving into temporal markers. However, Russian spatial proximity marker tut ‘here,’ which develops temporal proximity meanings, demonstrates a deviation from this tendency. Its meaning, though, is different from the meanings of classical deictic markers of temporal proximity, such as sejčas ‘now.’ Tut develops a synthetic meaning of actuality, which comprises the following semantic elements: (a) time period which includes the moment of speech, and such moments preceding and following it that are sufficiently close to the moment of speech to retain connection with it; (b) physical or mental space that includes the speaker; (c) a situation where the speaker is either a participant or an observer. Besides its special semantic properties, tut is characterized by communicative and prosodic peculiarities.

Keywords: semantics, семантика, prosody, просодия, пространственный и временной дейксис, момент речи, коммуникативная функция, грамматикализация, spatial and temporal deixis, moment of speech, communicative function

In book

Смыслы, тексты и другие захватывающие сюжеты. Сборник статей в честь 80-летия И.А. Мельчука

М.: Языки славянских культур, 2012.