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PREFACE
The present volume contains a collection of papers dedicated to the study of the verbal morphology and syntax of the Armenian language. In all of its attested varieties, Armenian provides a rich evidence for all fields oflinguistics as reflected in multiple approaches and subjects presented in this volume.
The volume is centered around the papers presented at the workshop The Armenian Verb, held within the international conference Armenian Language Contacts through the Ages at the Institute for Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg on the 12th-15th of May, 2015, and dedicated to the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. It is the editors' pleasant duty to thank all the contributors as well as the participants of the workshop.
The paper of Anai'd Donabedian, dedicated to the semantics of the aorist tense in Modern Armenian, has theoretical significance. Based on a nuanced corpus-based and typologically-oriented analysis of usage of aorist forms, the author reveals core and peripheral functions of that morphological category. The paper contributes to the identification of universal properties of the aorist category as well as of idiosyncratic peculiarities in its usage in Modern Eastern and Western Armenian. By contrasting the aorist to other morphological categories, the author determines its position within the verbal system as a whole.
In his paper, Vartan K. Kazaryan provides an analysis of the Indo-European sources of Old Armenian tense-aspect stems with the focus on the role of the binary opposition of the present and aorist tenses at different stages of the language history from Proto-Indo-European to Old Armenian. The author explores the intricate interrelation of the derivational and inflectional markers as means to express that opposition.
Ronald Kim presents a fresh look at the history of the Old Armenian weak aorist. The author thoroughly analyzes the distribution of two types of aorist stems in -ac'- and -ec'- and explains the derivational ties between these stems and the Proto-Indo-European * sfe/o-formations.
Preface
An important issue of the historical verbal morphology of Armenian consists in the interrelation of the tense and voice categories. This question has been addressed in several papers included into the present volume.
The genesis of the mediopassive voice marking in the aorist tense is treated by Petr A. Kocharov. The author provides additional arguments in favor of the hypothesis that the Old Armenian mediopassive aorist endings resulted from the reanalysis of the inherited tense-aspect stems and not from the generalized phonetic outcome of the 3 pi. athematic acrostatic conjugation as many believe.
The paper by Frederik Kortlandt is dedicated to the traces of the Proto-Indo-European sigmatic aorist in Old Armenian. The author develops the hypothsis of two layers of sigmatic formations and provides an insightful analysis of the relative chronology of phonetic and morphological processes that allow to better understand the evolution of the Proto-Armenian verbal system.
Hrach Martirosyan dedicates his paper to the variation of dialectal aorist forms related to the Classical Armenian aorist. The author gives a detailed account of the peculiarities of the dialectal attestations of the augment and the 3rd plural aorist form, which may serve as isoglosses that allow to identify archaisms in some of the Armenian dialects.
Already at the conference, Remy Viredaz presented a handout of 80 pages explaining the origin of the Old Armenian personal endings of the imperfect and aorist tenses. The published paper has been much extended. It contains important observations reaching far beyond the Armenian language. In particular, Viredaz provides a detailed presentation of morphological parallels between the Armenian verbal system and that of Italic, Iranian, Baltic, and Slavic languages. Today, as Armenian is generally assumed to form one subgroup of Indo-European branches with Greek and Phrygian, any demonstration of shared morphological features with other branches is of paramount importance.
The editors hope that the materials, presented in this volume, will stimulate further development of Armenian studies and the discussion of topical issues of the Armenian verbal morphology and syntax in synchrony and diachrony.
Nikolai N. Kazansky DOI 10.30842/alp2306573714101
