Narrative verbal forms in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects

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Abstract I examine various types of verbal forms used in narratives of the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) dialects. They have in common the feature of dependence on the preceding discourse. These dependent narrative forms can be classified into ‘underspecified forms’ and ‘subordinate forms’. The underspecified forms include habitual forms and perfect forms, both of which lack the full specification of an event in their prototypical grammatical meaning. The specification of the event depends on the narrative context. The subordinate narrative forms have developed by a process of insubordination whereby their use has been extended from syntactically subordinate clauses to main clauses that are semantically dependent on the preceding discourse. One factor that may have motivated this insubordination process in the case of the narrative subjunctive qaṭəl form is the conservative continuity of the morphological shape of the narrative qāṭēl form, which was a feature of earlier Aramaic narrative style.