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Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Dalila Ayoun, Agnès Celle and Laure Lansari
[Studies in Language Companion Series 197] 2018
► pp. 261–280

Chapter 12
The perfect in Avar and Andi

Cross-linguistic variation among two closely-related East Caucasian languages

| National Research University, Higher School of Economics Moscow
This chapter deals with perfect forms of the verb in Avar and Andi, two East Caucasian languages. The presence of an ergative agent is shown to be an important parameter in distinguishing resultative constructions from resultative perfects in these languages. This distinction is relevant to determine whether current relevance meanings of the perfect are at all represented in these languages, alongside resultative proper and evidential usages. Based on elicitation as well as corpus data, this study shows that the Avar perfect represents a highly polysemic verb form that combines resultative proper, current relevance and indirect evidentiality, while its Andi counterpart shows a more advanced stage of grammaticalization of the indirect evidential meaning.
Keywords: perfect, evidentiality, resultative, East Caucasian languages, Avar
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Typology of the perfect and East Caucasian languages
    • 2.1 The problem of the resultative
    • 2.2Grammaticalization: From resultative to current relevance and indirect evidence
    • 2.3 Perfects in narrative sequences and with definite past time reference
    • 2.4 The functional distribution of universal gram-types associated with the perfect
  • 3. Avar and Andi
    • 3.1Verbal morphology and the perfect
    • 3.2Data
    • 3.3 Current relevance
    • 3.4Resultatives and agents
    • 3.5Non-witnessed and witnessed events
    • 3.6Forms derived from the perfect
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.197.12ver
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Verhees, Samira
2019. General converbs in Andi. Studies in Language 43:1 ► pp. 195 ff. DOI logo

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