Prospective and Proximative in Turkic, Iranian and beyond

The present volume addresses the linguistic categories of Prospective and Proximative. Prospective refers to an event which is expected, presumed, or will take place while Proximative refers to its pre-stage; its canonical semantics is ‘be going/about to do something’. Highlighting historical, areal and typological aspects, the contributions in this book investigate the encoding of proximative and prospective semantics in genetically related and non-related languages. While Iranian and Turkic languages are the focal point, several contact languages of historical and typological relevance (and potentially of interest for phylogenetic studies), viz. Aramaic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Uralic, have been included.

A comprehensive introductory section discusses both theoretical and methodological issues; it is followed by in-depth analysis articles and shorter case studies, the latter arranged geographically: Prospective and Proximative in languages spoken in Southern Europe, Iran and the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia and China. For most of these languages, the categories of Prospective and/or Proximative are described here for the first time.

The research presented in this volume enriches our understanding of the Prospective and Proximative by identifying hitherto unknown encoding strategies, among them discourse, modal and aspectual particles, portmanteau morphemes expressing clusters of proximative and aspectual or evidential semantics, etc. Of particular typological significance are advances in the analysis of the semantic structures of proximative and prospective categories as well as of the sources and grammaticalization paths of the individual forms.

This volume will be an inspiration for further research on the categories of Prospective and Proximative in the languages of Eurasia and beyond. It will be not only of interest for scholars dealing with the respective languages and language families, but also of great importance for historical and areal linguistics, language typology and theoretical linguistics.