О «возрасте» грамматической категории вида в современном осетинском языке: история и реалии

А. А. Левитская

doi:10.30842/30346800.2026.2.2.2

Authors

Alina A. Levitskaya Institute of History and Archeology of the Republic of North Ossetia Alania Author https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5433-0078

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30842/30346800.2026.2.2.2

Keywords:

preverbs, telic, atelic, perfectivity, imperfectivity, perceptivity, aspect, Ossetic, Russian

Abstract

This article addresses for the first time the issue of the “age” of aspect as a grammatical category in modern Ossetic.

A study of the two variants of modern Ossetic, viewed in the context of Ossetic history and contacts with the Slavic world, suggests that the development of aspectual oppositions based on a “focus on reaching the limit” began no earlier than the mid-13 th century to early 14 th century. In the more archaic Digor variant, this process remains incomplete. Aspectual data from Digor reveal traces of an undifferentiated or only partially differentiated aspect. Iron evidence also points to the relatively recent emergence of aspectual oppositions in Ossetic. Particularly revealing are verbs with the prefix fæ-, whose functions reflect different stages in the development of the Ossetic aspectual system.

Comparison with Russian highlights important differences. In Russian, the grammatical category of aspect covers both processuality and multiplicity. In Ossetic, these meanings are distributed across two categories: aspect expresses processuality, whereas multiplicity is expressed by a separate means, typically through the “verb + -iu” construction. The independent development of aspect in Russian and Ossetic on similar semantic grounds, i.e. limitation and directionality, offers valuable insights for comparative and general aspectology.

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