Futurate readings of past-tensed forms in Russian at the syntax/pragmatics interface

Russian past-inflected perfective verbs describing telic events may be coerced into futurate readings under pragmatically salient contextual conditions. It is proposed that the Russian ‘past’ morpheme -l- only contributes to the Reichenbachian E(vent time)-R(eference time) relation and lexicalizes Iatridou's (2000) Exclusion Feature ExclF that can range over times or over worlds, while the R-S(peech-time) relation is resolved at the syntax-pragmatics interface, making use of Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1995) and of Smith’s (1990) insights on context as dynamically built via explicatures enriching the propositional content of the utterance.