Deixis; semantic questions

March 8, 2010

Deixis and Semantics

In elementary Russian we learn that the adverb долго means ‘for a long time’: я долго работал, ‘I worked for a long time’. But if we want to relate the ‘long time’ or extent of a process or state to now, that is, to relate this to the speech-time, we use давно, as in я давно работаю в Тулэйне, ‘I have been working at Tulane for a long time’. Note the wonderful English present progressive aspect, which is so difficult, ironically, for Russians to learn. ‘I work long time at Tulane’ just isn’t good enough in English.

When the postal lady in Начало wants to explain why she hasn’t gotten everybody’s magazines and newspapers delivered correctly, she says я недавно работаю на почте, ‘I’ve only recently been working at the post office’, literally ‘I not-long-time work at post office’. Cf. French j’habite ici depuis longtemps ‘I’ve been living here ‘since’ a long time, with that French adverb depuis serving to fix the start of a state in the past and carry it up into the present moment, just as давно does.


“Have you been studying Russian long?'
“Almost a year.”
— Вы давно изучаете русский?
— Почти год.

Suppose you want to say that a single event occurred a long time ago; the event is in the perfective past, say я написал письмо о новой квартире ‘I wrote a letter about the new apartment’, Insert давно: я давно написал письмо ‘I wrote a letter a long time ago’. This signals that the event of writing the letter was distant in the past from the reference point of the speaker, in this case, the present.

Suppose you are telling a story in the past tense. “I was at home after work. I had been home/had long ago arrived home a long time when the phone rang. It was my old friend Dmitriy.” Я был дома после работы. Я давно уже пришел домой, когда зазвонил телефон. This is like the pluperfect tense, which as you know, doesn’t exist as such in Russian. It may be helped along by the aspectual particle уже, as above. ‘I had arrived home long since when the telephone rang.”

Давным–давно ‘long, long ago’ is used to introduce and characterize the temporal distance of an event. It is narrative.
I like contraries, antonyms, and opposites. They often reveal an internal asymmetry, as in young and old, tall and short, quick and slow. We say ‘how old are you?’ and ‘how tall are you?’.The Russian word редко means ‘rarely’ and часто means ‘often.’ The word изредка, built out of the preposition из ‘out of’ and the word редко, is glossed to mean ‘sometimes; not often’, which is indeed not exactly the same as ‘rarely’. It is ‘rarely’ with something else added, perhaps an attentuative or a weakening of ‘rarely’; it is almost ‘sporadically’ but not quite ‘from time to time’. It is ‘rarely’, but not so baldly so, and it is not quite ‘sometimes’.

I believe there is no such thing as perfect synonymy; there’s always some subtle difference between two synonyms, be it register — the context of discourse — or style or nuance of diction.

Next time: how Russian expresses definite and indefinite articles.
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