Tense, aspect, modality and finiteness in East Caucasian languages

Abstract

This collection of papers deals with the morphosyntax of verbal categories in a broad sample of languages spoken in the Eastern Caucasus. Most of these languages are genetically related and belong to the East Caucasian (alias Nakh-Daghestanian) family, but similarities with surrounding Turkic or North-West Caucasian languages are also touched upon in some of the contributions. MARINA CHUMAKINA's paper "Morphological complexity of Archi verbs" offers a typical example, based on a single and very small, but well studied language, of how verbal forms are built in most East Caucasian languages; TIMUR MAISAK's contribution then studies the present and the future forms within the Lezgic tense and aspect systems focussing on one branch of the family, while a paper by GILLES AUTHIER "From adlocative case to debitive mood without desubordination in Budugh and Kryz" zooms on an understudied sub-branch to address a current debate on morpheme polycategoriality. NINA DOBRUSHINA in her wide-ranging study on the Optative domain in East Caucasian languages builds on the contributor's general expertise on this topic. NINA SUMBATOVA, the main specialist of the Dargwa branch of East Caucasian - a family in which verbs usually do not bear person indexes - takes up the puzzle of person hierarchies and the problem of person marker origin in Dargwa. The scope of ELENA KALININA's "Exclamative clauses in the languages of the North Caucasus and the problem of finiteness" is broader and proposes original views on a neglected aspect of verbal morphosyntax.

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