LWM 22: Modern Eastern Armenian

Modern Eastern Armenian

Natalia Kozintseva

Modern Eastern Armenian (MEA) is spoken in Armenia by about 2.7 million people, where it is the standard language. It belongs to the Indo-European stock, within which it constitutes an isolated branch.

The present sketch deals mainly with the grammatical description of MEA.  Nouns have a singular/plural number distinction, a postpositive definite article, a prepositive indefinite article, five cases (nominative=accusative, genitive=dative, instrumental, ablative, locative). The word order is relatively free (non-rigid SOV). The subject is usually placed before or after the predicate, the complements and adverbial modifiers may be placed before or after the predicate, depending on the functional sentence perspective. In the noun phrase, the attribute always precedes the noun. Postpositions prevail over prepositions. Especial attention is paid to verbal categories (voice, aspect, tense, and mood in their relation to the syntactic structure of the sentence).

The sketch is supplemented with an original MEA text and an extensive bibliography.

ISBN 9783895860355. Languages of the World/Materials 22. 1995.