Future Anterior in the Document Language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania

Abstract

The paper deals with the semantics and the distribution of the future anterior in the 14th‒16th century official writing of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The paper focuses on the construction which comprises a perfective present form of the auxiliary be ( bud -) and an l -participle. The paper takes into consideration data from more than  900 charters as well as from the Lithuanian Statute of 1588. The author claims that the future anterior in official Ruthenian is licensed by contexts with suspended assertion (conditional, disjunction, indirect question, propositional predicate, etc.). In most other cases, it is powered by iterative, habitual, or experiencer meanings, or by the multiplicity of the objects involved in the situation. In some contexts, the use of the future anterior is defined exclusively by syntactic rules, i. e., the use in the dependent clause. In this respect, the future anterior is similar to the French subjunctive and the Latin conjunctive at their later stages of grammaticalization. The future anterior in official Ruthenian may also acquire a particular discourse function, i. e., undergo pragmaticalization, which results in the ability of the future anterior to mark an indirect speech act of disproof or cancellation of what was evidenced by the opponent. Ruthenian turns out to be a unique language across Slavic and SAE to feature a widely used dubitative future anterior. DOI: 10.31168/2305-6754.2020.9.2.8