Full Description
The Caucasus is the place with the greatest linguistic variation in Europe. The present volume explores this variation within the tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality systems in the languages of the North-East Caucasian (or Nakh-Daghestanian) family. The papers of the volume cover the most challenging and typologically interesting features such as aspect and the complicated interaction of aspectual oppositions expressed by stem allomorphy and inflectional paradigms, grammaticalized evidentiality and mirativity, and the semantics of rare verbal categories such as the deliberative ('May I go?'), the noncurative ('Let him go, I don't care'), different types of habituals (gnomic, qualitative, non-generic), and perfective tenses (aorist, perfect, resultative). The book offers an overview of these features in order to gain a broader picture of the verbal semantics covering the whole North-East Caucasian family. At the same time it provides in-depth studies of the most fascinating phenomena.
Contents
Contents
List of Tables, Figures and Maps
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Diana Forker
1 Tense, Aspect, Mood and Evidentiality in Chechen and Ingush
Zarina Molochieva and Johanna Nichols
2 The Tense / Aspect System of Standard Dargwa
Rasul Mutalov
3 Aorist, Resultative, and Perfect in Shiri Dargwa and Beyond
Oleg Belyaev
4 The Aorist / Perfect Distinction in Nizh Udi
Timur Maisak
5 Perfective Tenses and Epistemic Modality in Northern Akhvakh
Denis Creissels
6 The Semantics of Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality in Avar
Diana Forker
7 Mood in Archi: Realization and Semantics
Marina Chumakina
8 Aspectual Stems in Three East Caucasian Languages
Michael Daniel
