Mapping the future time reference in Standard Eastern Armenian and across the dialects

Voprosy Jazykoznanija. 2026. No. 5. P. 81–98.

Khurshudyan V., Plungian Vladimir, Stepanyants Maxim

This study examines the range of strategies used to encode future time reference in Standard EasternArmenian, situating them within the broader context of other Modern Armenian varieties. Illustrative data are drawn from Standard Western Armenian, the Hadrut dialect, and the Hamshen dialect. Adopting a semantic approach, we employ the term “future time reference” to delimit the scope of our analysis. The sources of the empirical material are mostly corpora, fieldwork, and elicitation. The identified strategies are classified into three broad categories. (i) Core grammatical strategies: the conditional mood (k‑forms) and the destinative aspectual periphrasis (in ‑lu). (ii) Constructions exhibiting incipient grammaticalization: the debitive construction (with piti ‘must’), the inferential prospective (with uzem ‘want’), the immediate prospective (with vra ‘on’), the inchoative construction (with gnam ‘go’), and the subject participle (in ‑oġ). (iii) Grammatical forms entering this domain through semantic extension: the subjunctive mood, the present imperfective periphrasis (in ‑um), the aorist, and the present perfective periphrasis (in ‑el). Across Modern Armenian varieties, the systems of future time reference consist of several layers of grammaticalized units with varying chronological depth, and differ considerably in their composition and organization. We emphasize the need for more detailed descriptive research on the distribution and grammatical semantics of future time reference forms in Armenian dialects, as well as on their typology.

Keywords: будущее время, армянский язык, Armenian language, future tense