Structural and functional variations of the perfect in the Lezgic
languages
Timur Maisak | Institute of Linguistics RAS | HSE University
The paper presents a study of the morphological
and semantic properties of the perfects in nine Lezgic languages,
the southern branch of the East Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian)
language family. Morphologically, the perfects belong to the
perfective subsystem. They are usually periphrastic, with a tendency
to become synthetic due to auxiliary loss or merger. The functions
of the perfects vary among the languages of the group, but mostly
include the ‘current relevance’ perfect proper and the resultative
(stative). The experiential meaning is associated with the perfect
only in a few languages. In two languages (Agul and Archi), the
perfect has further evolved into an indirective evidential past,
although the diachronically earlier perfect and resultative
functions are still retained. Throughout the paper, I compare the
perfects to the aorists, which are the most frequent perfective past
tenses of the Lezgic languages. The aorists are much less
polyfunctional than the perfects and are mostly synthetic, although
periphrastic source models are also attested for them.
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