Maksim Melenchenko (HSE University) Omission of the light verb kin- ‘do’ in Shughni complex verbs

In the Shughni language (‹ Eastern Iranian), spoken in the Pamir mountains, the majority of verbal lexical meanings are expressed with multiword constructions called “complex verbs”. The talk focuses on a puzzling phenomenon: in complex verbs with the light verb kin- ‘do’ (for example, rāng kin- ‘paint’, lit. ‘color-do’) the root of the light verb can sometimes be omitted. In such instances, the subject agreement suffix on the verb attaches to the non-verbal component of the complex verb (for example, rāng kin-um ‘I color [smth]’ → rāng-um). This raises many interesting questions about morphosyntactic properties of the resulting construction (for example, about the phrasal / lexical status of the non-verbal component). In the talk, I will discuss these questions and their relation to the general phenomenon of complex verbs in Shughni, its diachronic development and the role of language contact in this process, as well as draw unexpected typological parallels (for example, with the Lezgic language [‹ East Caucasian]).