Perception of Future-Tense Constructions as a Cognitive-Psychological Category in English, German, and Russian

Abstract

The subject of this research is the relationship between grammatical constructions of future reference and the psychological perception of upcoming events by speakers of English, German, and Russian. The study aims to determine how the choice of a particular future construction shapes the cognitive evaluation of the future, above all the degree of certainty, intention, control, and inevitability. The material comprises three interconnected datasets: a set of experimental stimuli representing the most frequent future-reference models in each language; corpus data from national reference corpora (BNC/COCA, DeReKo/DWDS, RNC), on the basis of which these models were selected and verified; and the results of a pilot online survey in which native speakers rated the stimuli on a Likert scale. The methodology combines contextual and cognitive analysis, the comparison of linguistic forms, and the interpretation of perceptual indicators within a cognitive-cultural framework. Particular attention is paid to how the aspectual opposition in Russian, the contrast between will and be going to in English, and the context-dependent use of the present tense in German correspond to different models of perceiving the future. The scientific novelty lies in applying the experimental-perceptual approach developed in psycholinguistics to the comparison of English, German, and Russian specifically: instead of inferring cognitive meanings from grammatical description alone, the study relies on direct judgments by native speakers of these three languages. The findings show that the choice of grammatical forms systematically affects the interpretation of the future: English constructions clearly distinguish prediction from intention, German forms rely on the pragmatic context of planning, and Russian links the perception of the future to completion or processuality. This confirms that the grammatical packaging of an utterance directly correlates with culturally grounded cognitive models of time.