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Studies in Language: Online-First Articles

Discontinuous past interpretation in Abaza

ORCID logo | Institute of Linguistics, RAS , Russia

Abaza (Northwest Caucasian) has two perfective tenses which mark events in the past. In single clauses, however, one of them has a discontinuous interpretation. Recently, it has been argued that at least in some languages a discontinuous interpretation of past forms is a pragmatical implicature rather than a part of the encoded meaning. The aim of the paper is to describe the functions of the Abaza perfective past tenses and investigate the origin of the discontinuous interpretation in Abaza. Special attention is paid to the distribution of two tenses in various types of finite and non-finite clauses. The data show that there is no obligatory discontinuous interpretation in the syntactic environments where only one of the tenses can be used. However, the discontinuous interpretation does arise if two tenses compete with each other. Thus, the discontinuous implicature in Abaza can be considered a pragmatical implicature.

Keywords: discontinuous past, Northwest Caucasian languages, verbal morphology, cessation implicature
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Discontinuous past
    • 2.2Cessation implicature
  • 3.Verbal morphology in Abaza
    • 3.1Tense system in Abaza
    • 3.2Past tenses in Abaza
  • 4.Aorist and Retro-aorist in single clauses: An experiment
  • 5.Aorist and Retro-aorist in non-finite clauses and questions
    • 5.1Argument relative clauses
    • 5.2Adjunct relative clauses
    • 5.3Questions
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Scalar alternatives approach
    • 6.2Modal dimension approach
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 6 June 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.23026.kly
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