Tense: tense
| Values: | Past | Pres |
Tense is an inflectional feature that specifies the time when the action takes place, in relation to the moment of speaking or another action in the utterance. In Classical Armenian, it is tagged on finite verbs and auxiliaries, and is intricately related to the features of Aspect and Mood. The feature has two values: present Pres and past Past. Classical Armenian does not have a dedicated future form; the future is typically expressed by the subjunctive mood forms (Mood=Sub), cf. future/subjunctive (perfective): ասացից/asacʻicʻ “I will/would say”, future/subjunctive (imperfective): ասիցեմ/asicʻem “I will/would be saying”.
Pres: present tense
The present tense denotes events co-referential with the moment of speaking or events without a specified temporal localisation (habitual).
Examples
- Present: ասեմ/asem “I say; I am saying”.
Past: past tense
The past tense denotes events that happened before the moment of speaking. Classical Armenian has the perfective past, the aorist, and the imperfective past, the imperfect, which are differentiated by the aspect features Aspect=Perf and Aspect=Imp, respectively.
Examples
- Aorist: ասացի/asacʻi “I said”.
- Imperfect: ասեի/asei “I was saying”.
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.
Tense in other languages: [ab] [abq] [aqz] [arr] [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [el] [en] [es] [fi] [fr] [ga] [gn] [gub] [ha] [hu] [hy] [it] [jaa] [ka] [ky] [pcm] [ps] [qpm] [ru] [sah] [say] [sl] [sv] [tr] [tt] [u] [uk] [urb] [urj] [xcl]