Polyphonic utterances: alternation of present and past in reported speech and thoughts in Russian

This study aims to account for how tenses in Russian contribute to creating the effect of bivocality in indirect discourse and in a particular case of Free Indirect Discourse (FID). The use and readings of tenses in Russian are compared to French. The analysis is based on the assumption that the use and reading of tenses depends, first, on the mode of discourse (dialogue mode vs. narrative mode) and, second, on the attitude denoted by the matrix verb. The analysis accounts for three cases: (i) alternation of the Russian dependent present and the overlapping past under the past of saying predicates within the dialogue mode; (ii) alternation of these tenses under cognitive factive predicates within the narrative mode; (iii) bivocality in a particular case of FID.