Article

Name: On diachronically early functions and semantics of the «evidential perfect» in the languages of North Asia

Authors: L. A. Ilyina

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Linguistics

Abstract: The presented paper focuses on identifying and explaining the diachronic-typological parallels of the verb evidential category in he languages of North Asia. Based on the materials of the archaic traditional folklore texts of North Asian indigenous ethnoses, the paper identifies and analyses diachronically early communicative functions of the polysemantic evidential grammeme, mostly universal for the Eurasian languages. In the literature this grammeme is termed in different ways including the term «evidential perfect» involved in the paper headline. The author of the paper puts forward and gives proofs of the hypothesis on the ancient character of the identified communicative functions of the grammeme under investigation and the ancient character of the grammatical semantics manifested while realizing these functions.

Keywords: evidentials, north asian languages, inference, reportative, mirativity, mediativity, ancient communicative functions, grammatical-semantic evolution

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