The results of a comparative study of verb forms with aspectual semantics in Ancient Greek (Koine) (which has an overt category of aspect) and Latin (where aspect is rather a covert category), based on the Gospel of Mark, have shown that the expected correspondence of verb forms appears to be standard in the material as well: it is found in the majority of cases (97,6 % of the Ancient Greek Aorist translated by the Latin Perfect, and 89,4 % of the Ancient Greek Imperfect/ Present translated by the Latin Imperfect). Therefore, there must be a considerable semantic overlap between the Ancient Greek Aorist and the Latin Perfect forms and between the Ancient Greek Imperfect/Present forms and the Latin Imperfect forms. For each pair, there must be a common semantic core, corresponding in the first case to the perfective, and in the second case to the imperfective viewpoints. In the minority of cases, we find deviations from this standard correspondence. Some of them can be explained by the trivial fact that the context allows freedom in the choice of the aspectual viewpoint. However, in several cases, the discrepancies are not accidental and can be explained by the existence of specific differences between the grammatical systems of two languages. These include iterative contexts and contexts with speech verbs
This article compares the use of two similar ways of expressing relative future tense in Latin: the future passive infinitive and the construction fore/futurum (esse) ut. This construction is regularly found in the same contexts as the future infinitives, and may serve as an alternative for verbs lacking a supine form. What appears to be of particular interest is its widespread use in cases where a supine is available, and the future infinitive could have been used. Up to the present day, there have been very few studies on this topic. In the present study, the author aims to fill this gap and to examine the relevant syntactic constructions in the passive voice, to begin with a limited corpus of examples. Cicero’s texts were chosen as the material for the study, since they preserve the largest number of these forms, furthermore, such material allows us to conduct the study within the language of one author. The study was conducted with the help of the computer database PHI-5. Having examined the resulting sample, the author identifies tendencies typical for the use of the infinitive and the construction, as well as their pragmatic features and differences. The infinitive is used in objective contexts with a high degree of epistemic support and, as a rule, when there are valid reasons to believe that a certain event will happen. The fore ut construction in our corpus is chosen either to denote the events that were not destined to happen or to convey someone else’s opinion, and introduces a subjective and sometimes counterfactual overtone into the embedded predication. The set of verbs that occur as future infinitives and those used in the predication embedded under fore ut does not overlap, with few exceptions, which may be due to the different aspectual characteristics of these verbs.