The lexeme wældaj in Ossetic: between an exceptive and a similative marker

Abstract

In Iron Ossetic, there is a lexeme wældaj with the meanings 1) ‘extra, excess’ (cf. wældaj zərd ‘unnecessary word’); 2) ‘abundance, leftover’; 3) ‘special’; 4) ‘in addition to’; 5) ‘different’, according to the Historical-Etymological Dictionary of Ossetic by V. I. Abaev. In the last two senses, which are discussed in the paper, wældaj is used with the ablative case. Moreover, wældaj has the meaning ‘except’. When wældaj is used in the exceptive construction (‘nobody / nothing / everything except X’) and the exceptive-additive construction (‘in addition to X, Y’) it competes with the basic exceptive marker jet:æmæ ‘except’ and the marker fæštæmæ ‘back to’. Jet:æmæ, like wældaj, is typically used in constructions with negative pronouns like ‘nobody / nothing’, and fæštæmæ is more commonly used with universal quantifiers like ‘everything’. They are more rarely used in the exceptive-additive construction than wældaj.

Furthermore, some dictionaries note that wældaj has a similative meaning ‘like, as’. I describe three types of similative constructions with wældaj: the construction with the verb wævən ‘to be’ with negative particles (X Y-abl wældaj neg-be), the construction with the negative existential copula næj (X-abl Y-abl wældaj neg.exst) and the construction with other verbs with negative particles. I show that the similative meaning can be derived from the meaning ‘different’, since wældaj is mostly used in sentences with a negative existential verb (‘X is not different from Y’ = ‘X is like Y’). At the same time, in some contexts with lexical verbs, wældaj seems to function as a true similative marker.