Hinuq verb forms and finiteness

Abstract

This paper offers a comprehensive account of the verbal morphology in the Nakh-Daghestanian (or Northeast Caucasian) language Hinuq. As typical of the languages of that part of the world, Hinuq has a rich inventory of verbal inflectional suffixes, giving rise to verb forms with only verbal properties, and other verb forms lacking some verbal properties and having adjectival, adverbial or nominal properties instead. I argue that all Hinuq verb forms can be divided into two groups along the lines of their usage as heads of independent or dependent clauses. Furthermore, I demonstrate that some verb forms, which at first glance seem to violate this classification, synchronically represent different verb forms that can clearly be distinguished functionally and partially also on formal grounds. The paper also contributes to the actual discussion of the notion ‘finiteness’ and its applicability to Nakh-Daghestanian languages.