Perfective in Eastern Armenian

Abstract

In this paper I investigate the -c’ perfective in Armenian addressing two puzzles related to its semantics. First, it is possible to cancel the culmination inference of an accomplishment VP in -c’ perfective only if the event started a short while ago, and second, likewise, some stative verbs in the -c’ perfective allow cancelation of the culmination inference. I propose that -c’ perfective is the realization of two operators; a 'ER' operator that establishes 'a process' or 'transition' relation between eventualities and events, and a 'Result' operator that introduces a relation between a state and the event that caused it. The major contribution of this paper is to advance our understanding of the cross-linguistic options for encoding completed events and to show how micro-variation between languages can be captured by breaking down perfective aspect into component parts.