EXPRESSION OF TENSE AND ASPECT IN RUSSIAN, UZBEK, AND ENGLISH: A FUNCTIONAL-TYPOLOGICAL STUDY

Abstract

The categories of tense and aspect play a fundamental role in the grammatical organization of human languages, reflecting how events are temporally located and internally structured. This article presents a functional-typological comparison of the expression of tense and aspect in Russian, Uzbek, and English—three languages belonging to different language families and typological traditions. English represents an analytically oriented system with a rich set of tense–aspect constructions, Uzbek exemplifies an agglutinative system with morphologically expressed tense and aspect, while Russian is characterized by a dominant aspectual opposition combined with a relatively limited tense system. The study aims to identify the formal means and functional motivations underlying tense–aspect marking in these languages and to examine how grammatical choices are shaped by discourse and communicative needs. Using a qualitative comparative methodology based on descriptive grammars and typological research, the paper demonstrates that while all three languages encode temporal relations, they differ significantly in the relative prominence of tense versus aspect. The findings contribute to cross-linguistic studies of temporality by highlighting the interaction between morphology, syntax, and semantics in tense–aspect systems.