Affiliation:
1. National Research University Higher School of Economics/Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences , Sector of Typology/Moscow State University, Institute for Linguistic , RAS, 1 Bld. 1 Bolshoy Kislovsky lane, 125009 Moscow , Russia
Abstract
Abstract
The paper focuses on a two aspectual morphemes in Moksha Mordvin (<Mordvin<Finno-Ugric). The first of them, the Frequentative, has four phonologically conditioned allomorphs, -ənd-, -n’ə-, -s’ə-, and -kšn’ə-. These affixes used to be separate morphemes in Proto-Finno-Ugric, but ended up as having the same meaning and being complementarily distributed. A remnant of a more archaic stage of language evolution is the Avertive marker, -əkšn’ə-, only different from one of the Frequentative allomorphs by one phoneme, which can hardly be a coincidence. A diachronic hypothesis about how iterative-avertive polyfunctionality could have arisen is suggested.
Reference42 articles.
1. Alhoniemi, Alho. 1993. Grammatik des Tscheremissischen (Mari). Hamburg: Buske.
2. Auwera, Johan van der & Vladimir Plungian. 1998. Modality’s semantic map. Linguistic Typology 2. 79–124.
3. Boneh, Nora & Edit Doron. 2008. Habituality and the habitual aspect. In Susan Rothstein (ed.), Theoretical and crosslinguistic approaches to the semantics of aspect, 321–347. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
4. Boneh, Nora & Edith Doron. 2010. Modal and temporal aspects of habituality. In Malka Rappaport Hovav, Edit Doron & Ivy Sichel (eds.), Lexical semantics, syntax, and event structure, 338–363. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
5. Bybee, Joan. 1986. On the nature of grammatical categories: A diachronic perspective. Eastern States Conference on Linguistics 2. 17–34.