Tense and Auxiliary Verbs With Special Reference to Slavic Languages | Language | Cambridge Core Search Institution Login Search Hostname: page-component-66d9dcfd78-5vcr7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-08-07T20:18:57.027Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false Home > Journals > Language > Volume 16 Issue 3: July-September > Tense and Auxiliary Verbs With Special Reference to... English Français Language Article contents Extract References Tense and Auxiliary Verbs With Special Reference to Slavic Languages Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2026 Alexander Issatchenko Show author details Alexander Issatchenko* Affiliation: University of Ljubljana (Yugoslavia) Article Metrics Article contents Extract References Get access Share Cite Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window] Extract [The Slavic languages, with the exception of Bulgarian, in contrast with the languages of western Europe, have preserved the IE nominal inflection but have simplified the verbal system. Russian has gone farthest in this direction. Original auxiliaries in Russian have become particles; all finite verb forms except those of the present tense have been replaced by nominal or participial constructions.] Information Type Research Article Information Language , Volume 16 , Issue 3: July-September , September 1940 , pp. 189 - 198 DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/409054 [Opens in a new window] Copyright Copyright © 1940 Linguistic Society of America Access options Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.) Article purchase Temporarily unavailable References 1 1 Cf. the locution is going to say with future meaning. 2 2 In Romanic, German, English, etc., no distinction in method of formation must be made between the forms with suffix or ablaut and those which are 'syntactically paradigmatic'. The forms I saw and I have seen obviously fall into different morphological categories, but syntactically they fall into the same category, i.e. they are both tenses. 3 3 Auxiliary verbs do not only serve for tense formation. In French, Spanish, Italian, English, and German the complete passive in all its tenses is formed by means of auxiliary verbs. Moreover, the form itself may be omitted, e.g. u bráta dénbgi 'the brother has money'. In present-day Russian, equational predications are the only possibility. Only in newspaper or scientific language do we find and less frequently ‘they are’ used as a copula. This, however, is to be ascribed to the influence of translations from Latin, French, and German. 8 8 The copula of the 1st and 2d persons is not of OCS origin, it is native to Russian, as witness the folk song formulae oj ty goj esí, vy dóčeri esté 'you are the daughters', and Ukrainian dóbre esí 'thou art good'. Furthermore, the fact that the 1st and 2d pl. Bloomfield's remark (Language 439) 'in English and in German, forms like sing, singest, singeth have come to demand an actor, although there is no homonymy.' 11 11 That it is not a question of a mechanical disappearance of in all positions is clear from a consideration of Czech, where equational predications are not found, but where the 3d sg. and pl. perfect forms occur without auxiliary: on přišel 'he came'. 12 12 These forms do not only occur in literary language influenced by OCS (such as ecclesiastical texts), but also in genuine secular documents, such as deeds of sale, and in the language of officialdom, where the influence of OCS is at a minimum. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle . 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