The origin and development of the Nganasan indicative aorist perfect

This paper addresses the origin and development of the Nganasan indicative aorist markers. The system of Nganasan aorist marking, with its obligatory marking of lexical aspect through the selection of suffixes, is unique among the Samoyed languages, and the aorist suffixes themselves lack direct cognates in finite verbal paradigms outside Nganasan. The present paper asserts that the Nganasan markers of the indicative aorist have developed from Proto-­Samoyed deverbal forms via the process of refinitization, also known as verbalization, a common way of creating new finite paradigms in languages of northern Eurasia. Cognates for the Nganasan aorist suffixes can be found among the derivational forms of other Samoyed languages, and traces pointing towards their deverbal origin prevail in Nganasan as well. In parallel to the Nganasan imperfective aorist suffixes -NTU, -U, previously suggested to have originated in imperfective participles, I claim that the perfective aorist suffix -qe/-qa has likewise developed from a deverbal form, the modern cognates of which are found in the augmentative suffixes of northern Samoyed languages. The diverse patterns of aorist formation in Samoyed, as well as the largely opaque morphophonological alternations affecting the suffixes in Nganasan, suggest that the tense system of Proto-Samoyed was going through major changes exactly during the breakup of the common proto-language.