Copulas in Yaghnobi

Abstract

The paper is devoted to present tense copulas in the Yaghnobi language (Eastern Iranian) of the 1920s–1960s. The study is based on a corpus of oral texts with a total volume of 47000 words. Yaghnobi has three different forms of the copula in the third person singular of the Present: the full forms xast, ast and the suffix -x. I show that they all have distinct grammatical and semantic uses and should be considered different copulas. The main meanings of the copula -x are associated with identification and attribution, while the copula ast is most frequently used in existential sentences and the possessive construction. The latter also has an unusual temporal function. Unlike -x and ast, the copula xast has no central meaning, commonly conveying identificational, equational, existential and locative meanings. I further argue that all copulas can be omitted in most of their semantic functions (identification, attributive, possessive, locative, existential, equational, temporal). 

An interesting finding of this study is the existence of double copula sentences: sentences with a single subject where two copulas are used simultaneously. The analysis of such sentences shows that each copula conveys its own meaning (e.g. the first copula is identificational and the second existential). According to the available literature such constructions have not previously been described for Yaghnobi or other modern Iranian languages.