Видовременные формы глагола в инструктивном дискурсе в русском и болгарском языках: кулинарные рецепты - Temporal and Aspectual Verbal Forms in the Instructional Discourse of Russian and Bulgarian Recipes

The paper deals with the use of temporal and aspectual verbal forms in the instructional discourse, specifically, in Russian and Bulgarian recipes. Due to their prescriptive nature, the texts examined manifest various means to indicate illocutionary force, such as imperative, infinitive, and other less common forms (e.g. indefinite personal present in Russian and impersonal reciprocal passive in Bulgarian (imperfective verb + se). For each of the abovementioned forms, in addition to the standard values associated with perfective and imperfective aspect, several cases of deviation related to the peculiarities of the prescriptive discourse were attested. The paper discusses the use of the verbal aspect in recipes written in Russian (infinitive and imperative forms in particular) and the temporal-aspectual verbal forms in Bulgarian (i.e. impersonal reciprocal passive and infinitive). The material for the analysis was sourced from recipes published in forums or blogs at various times. Some of the Russian examples were drawn from the National Corpus of the Russian Language. The analysis shows that in Russian and Bulgarian recipes with imperative, as well as in Russian recipes with infinitive forms, the perfective verbs denoting a chain of consecutive completed actions are predominant. However, in both languages, there are deviations from the norm, primarily concerning the imperfective verbs. In some cases, the deviations are only apparent, since they express either the semantics of the beginning of the action (typical of imperfective forms in directive utterances) or the “general factual” meaning. In others, they relate to features of instructional discourse such as the presence of a shared world knowledge between the addresser and the addressee, which allows for the use of imperfective forms without indication of the duration of action.