Notes on Eastern Armenian verbal paradigms: “temporal mobility” and perfective stems

P. 233–245.

Plungian V.

The paper discusses two “hidden” semantic oppositions in the Armenian
verbal system: both have no specific segmental markers but are manifested
in the division of verbal forms into certain formal classes. In the first case, we deal
with the division into synthetic and periphrastic forms, which corresponds to
the expression of the so-called "temporal mobility" (or the ability to express the
opposition between present and past). In the second case, it is the morphological
opposition between the basic verbal stem and the stem with an alternation. The
choice of the alternating stem is related to the perfective semantics of the verbal
form, so that one can speak of a general aspectual opposition of perfective and
imperfective sets of forms in Armenian (not isolated in traditional analysis).

Keywords: inflectional morphology, tense and aspect, Armenian

In book

Aspects of linguistic variation: Studies in honor of Johan van der Auwera

Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2018.