The semantic structure of the aorist in modern Serbo-Croatian in the light of Vedic Sanskrit data

Maria Egorova
Russian State University for the Humanities

Abstract: In this paper I consider semantics of the aorist in Serbo-Croatian. Serbo-Croatian is a language with the so-called “extended perfect”, but the aorist is still vital both in colloquial speech and in poetry and prose fiction. I consider the combination of perfectivity, past time reference, and reference to witnessed information to be the basic meaning of the Serbo-Croatian aorist. The meaning of psychologically recent past is a predictable pragmatic extension of the basic meaning. Another two pragmatic extensions of the basic meaning of the aorist, namely current relevance and mirative, are less expected, but the same pragmatic extensions of the standard aoristic meaning are found in Vedic. Two semantic paths are proposed to explain the emergence of those meanings.

Keywords: Serbo-Croatian, aorist, grammatical semantics

For citation: Egorova M. The semantic structure of the aorist in modern Serbo-Croatian in the light of Vedic Sanskrit data. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2022. Vol. 5, iss. 2. Pp. 11–26. (In Rus.)