Verbal semantics in its struggle against time

The famous picture by Ilya Repin in the Tretiakov Gallery is called "Ivan Groznyj ubivaet svoego syna" 'Ivan the Great kills his son'. The verb UBIVAT' 'kill' denotes a process. But looking at the picture we see the son already killed. And no wonder. Visual art gives us a picture of reality -which is static and represents the state of affairs for the present moment.

It is commonly accepted that spoken language is more powerful than the language of visual art in this respect. Namely, it has means to represent the flow of time; it enables us to represent dynamics of the reality - to speak about processes and events that develop in time. It turns out, however, that in some respects the strategy of the spoken language is comparable to drawing pictures, so that the flow of time presents a difficulty for the spoken language as well. According to Fillmore's case grammar, a verb denotes a situation with a set of participants, each with its own role in the situation. There are such
roles as Agent, Patient, Instrument, Goal, etc. And everything is OK until the participant Result occurs on the stage. In fact, the verb in the Imperfective denotes, in its primary meaning, a picture restricted to one "intermediate" moment in the development; and the Result cannot co-occur in one sentence with those participants which belong to the previous temporal stages of the situation. This can be demonstrated on the example of the verb VYBRAT' 'to choose'. It has two diatheses - with and without participant Result (in the examples Result is in the upper case):

(1) a. Korol' Xussejn vybral [Past Pfv] sebe v preemniki SVOEGO SYNA ABDULLU
'The king Hussein chose HIS SON ABDULLAH as his successor';

b. Korol' Xussejn vybral [Past Pfv] sebe preemnika
'The king Hussein chose the successor'.

In the diathesis exemplified by (1a) the participant Result occupies the position of the Object; it is a direct diathesis. In (1b) the Object position is occupied by the Set of choice; the Result of the choice is not named - it is "Off screen".

The generalization is now at hand: in the case of the direct diathesis, when the Result is explicitly specified, the use of the Imperfective in the meaning of ongoing activity is impossible. So, in (2) the Result is present in the situation and, most likely, the Present Tense in (2) is to be interpreted as praesens historicum. In other words, Imperfective is here used, so to say, in the meaning of the Perfective:

(2) Korol' Xussejn vybiraet [Present Ipfv] sebe v preemniki SVOEGO SYNA ABDULLU
'The king Hussein chooses HIS SON ABDULLAH as his successor' [activity interpretation of Ipfv excluded].

The impossibility of ongoing activity interpretation of the Imperfective in the diathesis including participant Result is semantically substantiated: if the Result of a choice is already present among the participants of a situation, the activity directed to its achievement is senseless.

Several other classes of verbs are considered: phasal verbs, such as ZAKONCHIT' 'to finish <smth with smth>'; verbs of exerting influence on smb's mental state, such as OB'JASNIT' 'to explain'; verbs of creation of intellectual result, such as OPREDELIT' 'to define'. The case of material object creation verbs, such as POSTROIT' 'build', is slightly more complicated but it constitutes no contradiction to the generalization presented.