Pensare e vedere: una descrizione tempo-aspettuale in chiave contrastiva

The paper describes, from a Russian-Italian contrastive perspective, the aspectual behavior of a group of stative verbs. The analysis moves from the observation of the Russian dumat’ – podumat’ and videt’ – uvidet’, considering their use in the past tense. Adopting a corpus-based approach, it is observed that dumat’ and podumat’ exhibit a high degree of correspondence with Italian aspectual equivalents. In contrast, with videť – uvideť, not only the perfective, but also the imperfective is rendered in most cases with an Italian perfect tense, suggesting that ‘seeing’ frequently carries a punctual value. The research, which was extended to the verbs slyšat’ – uslyšat’ and ponimat’– ponjat’, also shows that the former pair behaves like videt’ – uvidet’, while the latter is used similarly to dumat’ – podumat’. This evidence suggests that that, in the expression of past actions, some more specific semantic differences may be involved, which link on the one hand verbs of cognition and on the other verbs of perception.