Auxiliary Clitics in Southwest Ukrainian: Questions of Chronology, Areal Distribution, and Grammaticalization

Abstract

This paper addresses grammaticalization of the preterit and future auxiliary clitics derived from the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to take’ in Southwest Ukrainian in comparison with North and Southeast Ukrainian, and the adjacent western and eastern Slavic dialects. It posits a parallel grammaticalization of such auxiliaries in the aspect of retrospection (preterit) and the aspect of prospection (future), although with different results in various Ukrainian dialects. Unlike the Polish auxiliaries that turned into person-number markers, the preterit auxiliary clitics are not fully degrammaticalized in Southwest Ukrainian and are altogether absent from North and Southeast Ukrainian. The auxiliary clitics used in the de-inceptive future derived from the periphrastic formation with the auxiliary ‘to take’ were undergoing grammaticalization along the clitic continuum postulated in the paper for the Ukrainian-speaking territories. The term ‘synthetic future‘ in Modern Ukrainian for formations like čytatymu ‘I will read’ is misleading, since the grammaticalization of the auxiliary did not run to completion. This explains its loose integration with the infinitive and the de-inceptive interpretation of the synthetic future ‘I will [begin] to read’ as compared to the analytic future formation ja budu čytaty ‘I will read’ in all the major Ukrainian dialects.

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