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      The morphosyntax of aspect stacking in Northeastern Neo-Aramaic

      Glossa: a journal of general linguistics
      Ubiquity Press, Ltd.

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          Abstract

          Many Northeastern Neo-Aramaic languages have two distinct strategies for marking perfective aspect, both morphosyntactically restricted in different ways. The canonical perfective strategy – the perfective verb base – typically bans certain types of objects, while the secondary perfective strategy – the imperfective verb base bearing the perfective prefix qam- – requires a certain type of object. This paper deals mainly with the secondary perfective strategy, attempting to understand and formally characterize its distribution and structure. While this phenomenon is well-known in the descriptive and historical literature (see Coghill 1999 and references therein), it has never before received theoretical treatment. I argue that qam- is a high perfective aspect marker analogous to certain so-called “superlexical” prefixes in Slavic languages, which have a perfectivizing function and select for an imperfective stem (Babko-Malaya 1999; 2003; Ramchand 2004; Romanova 2004; Tatevosov 2008; Gribanova 2013; i.a.). Slavic-like stacking of high aspects is thus shown to exist in languages that lack a corresponding system of rich lexical aspect (cf. the Slavic “lexical” prefixes). The secondary perfective in Northeastern Neo-Aramaic also illuminates another cross-linguistic pattern: apparent temporal or aspectual mismatches between the clause level and the verb-stem/base level, like those found in Indo-Iranian languages (Haig 2008), need not imply that the verb bases/stems lack tense and aspect. Finally, I show that the secondary perfective furnishes a new type of argument for the syntactic nature of φ-agreement.

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          Journal
          Glossa: a journal of general linguistics
          Glossa
          Ubiquity Press, Ltd.
          2397-1835
          April 01 2016
          December 02 2016
          : 1
          : 1
          : 49
          Article
          10.5334/gjgl.200
          ba80da09-54a4-47e4-9ae3-6f272a162419
          © 2016
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