The Pluperfect in Shughni and other Pamir languages
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30842/30346800.2025.1.1.4Keywords:
Pluperfect, Pamir languages, Shughni, IshkashimiAbstract
The article presents a comparative review of Pluperfects in Pamir languages, describing both structural and semantic properties of these forms. The data comes from the existing grammatical descriptions as well as recent work with speakers of contemporary Shughni and Ishkashimi conducted in Tajikistan. In the majority of Pamir languages (Bartangi, Roshorvi, Wakhi, Ishkashimi, Sanglechi, Yazghulami), Pluperfect is a periphrastic construction which consists of the Perfect form of the lexical verb and the Preterite form of the auxiliary verb ‘be’. In several languages of the Shughni-Rushani group (Shughni, Rushani, Khufi, Sarikoli), however, Pluperfects are derived from Perfects with a suffix. The diachronic origin of this suffix is unclear; some scholars have suggested that it originates in the auxiliary ‘be’. Many Pamir languages have developed a whole series of periphrastic forms which employ the Perfect form of the lexical verb and different tense forms of the auxiliary, possibly under influence from Tajik.
With respect to semantics, Pamir Pluperfects seem to have a typologically expected set of meanings. According to 20th century grammars, they have a clustering of discontinuous past (often called “distant past” in the literature) and irreal uses. The new data elicited in 2023–2024 shows that in the Khorugh variety of Shughni, Pluperfect has lost its traditional discontinuous past meaning, and stimuli which use it in this sense are unanimously considered incorrect by Khorugh speakers. Nowadays Shughni Pluperfect is used only as an irreal marker, namely, in counterfactual conditional or avertive contexts. In all remaining contexts, it is interchangeable with Perfect, which has a wider set of functions (most notably evidential and experiential). This fact may indicate that in Khorugh Shughni, Pluperfect is slowly dying out. However, there is some data that suggests that other Shughni dialects spoken in villages can be more conservative. At the same time, according to preliminary research, in contemporary Ishkashimi Pluperfect has retained discontinuous past contexts.
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