Maksim Stepanyants (HSE University) An attempt at a comprehensive description of Modern Eastern Armenian additive marker ēl

Modern Eastern Armenian (MEA) discourse markers have been generally neglected in the typological literature. However, there is one that has been included in the sample of Forker's (2016) influential paper on additives' polysemy, namely, ēl (էլ). A closer look at the semantics and morphosyntactic properties of this exponent reveals its broad polysemy, which can contribute to the theory of additive markers, cf. also (Gast & van der Auwera 2013. Its diachronic development also needs to be addressed: it presents a case of divergent development of multiple specialized markers (with different morphosyntactic properties) from a conceivable common source, possibly affected by areal influence. The marker ēl is special among other MEA focus markers (cf. Giorgi & Haroutyunian 2016) due to its almost unique enclitic status. In this talk an attempt will be made to address all these issues in a wholistic typologically-anchored approach.