Alcune note sulla distribuzione di rus. sejčas/teper' e it. ora/adesso

The present corpus-based study aims at investigating possible areas of cross-linguistic convergence regarding both the semantic and pragmatic properties and the syntactic distribution of two pairs of Russian (sejčas vs. teper') and Italian (ora vs. adesso) pure indexicals which, much alike the English now, can be alternatively used either as temporal operators or as textual pragmatic markers. The analysis has been carried out following a two-step procedure: on the one hand, a statistical sample of 600 examples has been manually extracted from the Russian-Italian parallel subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus; on the other hand, some of the Italian contexts have been presented in a separate questionnaire specifically designed for a randomized sample of Italian native speakers. The preliminary results seem to support the working hypothesis that in Russian sejčas and teper', besides their respective prototypical functions of temporal operator and textual pragmatic marker, are assigned a partially overlapping array of contextually determined meanings within the same continuum; moreover, in the contemporary language the functional domain of sejčas seems to be expanding and taking over most of the contexts which would previously feature the sole teper'. In Italian, on the contrary, the opposition between ora and adesso (which can interchangeably translate both sejčas and teper' with no significant semantic deviation) seems to be regulated exclusively by diatopic and/or diaphasic criteria.