Differential subject marking in Polish: The case of Genitive vs ...

There is also other (in fact more solid) evidence that BE (in Polish and Russian) is perfective. It
has been noted in the literature (see, e.g., Eriksen 2000:3) that the agreement suffixes employed
by what are traditionally called future tense forms of byt’ (‘to be’) in Russian (i.e., the budet-
forms) are actually ordinary present tense suffixes of Russian verbs; cf. (17a). The same holds for
the Polish “future forms” of byc, the bedzie-forms; cf. (17b). 27
(17) a. bud-u (1.SG) piš-u (write-1.SG.PRES) (Russian)
bud-eš’ (2.SG) piš-eš’
bud-et (3.SG) piš-et
bud-em (1.PL) piš -em
bud-ete (2.PL) piš-ete
bud-ut (3.PL) piš-ut
b. bed-e (1.SG) pisz-e (write-1.SG.PRES) (Polish)
bedzi-esz (2.SG) pisz-esz
bedzi-e (3.SG) pisz-e
bedzi-emy (1.PL) pisz-emy
bedzi-ecie (2.PL) pisz-ecie
bed-a (3.PL) pisz-a
Nevertheless, the budet-forms, despite being, morphologically speaking, present tense forms,
have exclusively future time reference; cf. (18a). This is characteristic of perfective verbs in
Slavic; cf. (18b) (see also footnote 21).
(18) a. Ona budet vracom. (Russian)
she NOM be3.SG.PRES doctorINSTR
‘She will be a doctor.’
b. Ona pišet /napišet pis’mo.
she NOM write3.SG.PRES.IMPERF /write3.SG.PRES.PERF letterACC
‘She is writing/will write a letter.’
27 Although the discussion in the main text is based on Russian, the same observations can be made with respect
to Polish as well.
16