Syntactic properties of the defective verb žīwǰ ‘love’ in Shughni

Maksim Melenchenko
HSE University

Abstract: “Defective” verb žīwǰ ‘love’ in Shughni only has the Perfect stem, but lacks Present and Preterite stems. Instead, to express these tenses, Shughni uses complex verbs with auxiliary verbs čīdow ‘do’ and vidow ‘be’. This paper attempts to describe the distribution of three constructions: the independent žīwǰ and the two complex verbs which use it, as well as to test whether this word has nominal properties. It is shown that in independent use žīwǰ actually exhibits more properties of a Perfect verb form than of a nominal, and the distribution between constructions may be motivated by the similarity of žīwǰ to stative verbs, which also use the Perfect form to express the present-tense state.

Keywords: love, Shughni, stative verbs, psych-verbs, complex verbs, transitivity

For citation: Melenchenko M. Syntactic properties of the defective verb žīwǰ ‘love’ in Shughni. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2024. Vol. 7, iss. 1. Pp. 64–88. (In Rus.). doi:10.37632/PI.2024.23.59.003