Notes on Eastern Armenian verbal paradigms

Abstract

: 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 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).