Mood: mood
| Values: | Imp | Ind | Sub |
In Classical Armenian, Mood is an inflectional feature that is tagged on finite verbs and auxiliaries, and is intricately related to the features of Aspect and Tense.
Ind: indicative
The indicative can be considered the default mood. A verb in indicative merely states that something happens, has happened or will happen, without adding any attitude of the speaker.
Examples
- Present indicative: ասեմ/asem “I say; I am saying”.
Imp: imperative
The speaker uses imperative to order or ask the addressee to do the action of the verb. Classical Armenian differentiate between the imperative and prohibitive (negated imperative). Both categories are tagged as Mood=Imp and are differentiated by the presence of the dependent negative particle մի/mi “not”, which is used with the prohibitive.
Examples
- Imperative: ասա/asa “say!”
- Prohibitive: մի լար / mi lar “don’t cry!”
Sub: subjunctive / future
The subjunctive mood is used under certain circumstances in subordinate clauses, typically for actions that are subjective or otherwise uncertain. In some contexts, the mood expresses also the desire that the action happens; it is thus close to both optative and jussive. In Classical Armenian, it has perfective and imperfective forms and can express the future.
The subjunctive can have an imperative form, sometimes called “cohortative”, with a special form of 2sg. in -ջիր/-ǰir. Given that the UD annotation scheme does not allow to combine two instances of one feature, the imperative forms do not have a dedicated tag in the current version of the CAVaL treebank and are tagged as variants of the 2sg. subjunctive form.
Examples
- Imperfective subjunctive: ասիցեմ/_asicʻem “I would/will be saying”
- Perfective subjunctive: ասասցեմ/_asascʻem “I would/will say”
- Cohortative: ասասջիր/asasǰir “could you say!”
References
Առաքելեան, Վարագ. 2010. Գրաբարի քերականութիւն. Երևան: Վիամիր․ [Araqelian, Varag. 2010. Grammar of Grabar. Yerevan: Viamir]
Jensen, Hans. 1959. Altarmenische Grammatik. Heidelberg: Winter.
Meillet, Antoine. 1913. Altarmenisches Elementarbuch. Heidelberg: Winters (Internet Archive)
Meillet, Antoine. 1962. Études de linguistique et de philologie arméniennes. I: Recherches sur la syntaxe comparée de l’arménien. Suivies de la composition en arménien. Lisbonne: Imprensa Nacional de Lisboa.
Kocharov, Petr. 2022. The mixed aorist subjunctive in Classical Armenian. Indogermanische Forschungen 127/1: 169–200.
Weitenberg, Jos. 1993. The use of the classical Armenian subjunctive forms in the fifth century and in middle Armenian Grabar texts: Koriwn and Grigor Aknercʿi. In: S. Simonian, J. Weitenberg (eds.), Computers in Armenian Philology. Yerevan: Armenian Academy Press: 72−100.
Mood in other languages: [ab] [akk] [arr] [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [el] [eme] [en] [es] [ess] [et] [fi] [fr] [ga] [gd] [gn] [gub] [hbo] [hu] [hy] [it] [jaa] [ka] [ky] [mdf] [myv] [pcm] [ps] [qpm] [qtd] [quc] [ru] [say] [sl] [sv] [tpn] [tr] [tt] [u] [ug] [uk] [urb] [urj] [xcl]