Variation in the past

Aorist and imperfect in the Timok dialect

Abstract

The Slavic languages are roughly divided into two groups according to (1) the loss or retention of the inherited simple past tenses (aorist and imperfect) and the concomitant development of the analytic perfect into a general past, and (2) the diminishing of the third-person auxiliary for the perfect forms. While these processes have led to a rather uniform picture for the contemporary North Slavic languages, the situation is far more complex in South Slavic. Aorist and imperfect are still attested in standard Macedonian, Bulgarian, and Serbian, albeit to different degrees, and the analytic perfects in these languages differ in the role of the third-person auxiliary. These trends intersect in Torlak, a group of dialects transitional between Western South Slavic and Balkan Slavic. The present paper zooms in on the Timok variety of Torlak, aiming to identify the usage patterns of the simple tenses and their relation to the analytic perfect. On the basis of a diatopically and diaphasically sampled corpus, it identifies the relevance of contact (Serbian–Balkan) and register (colloquial–written) for the variation encountered in the data.