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Iterative and avertive polysemy in Moksha Mordvin

  • Alexey Kozlov EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: February 26, 2019

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.

Abbreviations

1/2/3

first/second/third person

add

additive

aor

aorist

aver

avertive

caus

сausative

dat

dative

def

definite

desid

desiderative

el

elative

foc

focus

freq

frequentative

gen

genitive

imp

imperative

ill

illative

in

inessive

inch

inchoative

incp

inceptive

indef

indefinite

inf

infinitive

ipf

imperfect

lat

lative

loc

locative

mult

multiplicative

neg

negation

npst

non-past

o

object indexing

pass

passive

pfct

perfective

pl

plural

poss

possessive

pst

past

s

subject indexing

sg

singular

smlf

semelfactive

st

stative

temp

temporal

transl

translative

vbz

verbalizer

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Note:

The research is supported by Russian Scientific Foundation (project Nº 16-18-02081, carried out at the Lomonosov Moscow State University). Our data come from our own fieldwork in the Temnikovsky district, Republic of Mordovia from 2013 to 2016 with the team of the Moksha description project, from Moscow State University. The author is indebted to Leo Kozlov and Ivan Stenin for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper.


Published Online: 2019-02-26
Published in Print: 2019-04-24

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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