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.
Diana Forker (Ph.D. 2011, MPI-EVA and University of Leipzig) teaches Caucasus studies and Caucasian languages at the University of Jena. Among her recent publications are
A Grammar of Hinuq (2013) and articles on different aspects of Nakh-Daghestanian languages.
Timur Maisak (Ph.D. 2002, Moscow State University) is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has mainly published on verbal systems of Nakh-Daghestanian languages, including tense and aspect.
Contributors are: Oleg Belyaev, Marina Chumakina, Denis Creissels, Michael Daniel, Diana Forker, Timur Maisak, Zarina Molochieva, Rasul Mutalov, and Johanna Nichols.
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
General linguists, semanticists, experts of the Caucasus and anyone who is interested in the semantics of verbal categories or the Nakh-Daghestanian languages, and also theoretical linguists and anthropologists.