Abstract
Category of ‘tense’ is rather a psychological one. We must not confuse it with the physical ‘time.’ Russian verb has three ‘tenses’: a ‘past’(or rather, retrospective) verb expresses what is begone and unable to change, a ‘present’-process which is with us (actual or non-actual), a ‘future’(or rather, prospective)-what we intend to do or expect to happen. The aspect interwinds with the tense. Mr. A. Isacenko tries to divide tenses of Russian verb into preterit and non-preterit (La structure semantique des temps en russe, BSL 55, p.74 sqq.), but we must distinguish a future tense.‘Ja budu resat’(imperfective future) expresses a pure prospective continual process.‘Ja resu’(perfective present) expresses an action which we intend to finish or expect to happen, but it never expresses a regular real present process. Cf. my Russian Grammar, Tokyo, 1961. Chap. 17.
To what ‘part of speech’ belongs the so-called ‘category of status’? It is a delicate problem. We had better exclude such words as ‘dolzen, skazano, grex’ out of the ‘category of status’ they destroy the morphological unity. If the category of status' includes only words on -o (derived from adjectives) used as impersonal predicate, the ‘category’ forms a special group, which we can regard as a part of adverbs, if we accept that Russian adverb can be used as a predicate
