The elaboration of aspectual categories: Central Alaskan Yup’ik’. Folia Linguistica 30:111

Central Alaskan Yup'ik provides a rich exampl € of some kinds of elaboration that may develop in an aspectual system. It exhibits a lavish expansion of habitual categories that indicate various kinds of repetition of events over a period of time, as well as repetitive categories that identify events consisting of multiple subactions. It shows us, in addition, a less well known but flourishing mechanism by which aspectual sysiems may be elaborated: the extensive amalgamation of existing aspectual markers to yield new categories. 0. Intmduction Good progress has been made over the past quarter century in our understanding of the nature and evolution of aspectual systems. Much has been leamed both about the kinds of aspectual distinctions that recur cross-linguistically, as detailed for example in Comrie 1976, and about the diachronic pathways along which aspectual markers tend to develop. Bybee, Pertins & Pagliuca 1994 present a rich chronicle of the kinds of lexical items that evolve into aspectual affixes ard the subsequent evolution of their aspectual functions. At the same fime, more detailed and sophisticated descriptions of individual languages are revealing just how varied aspectual systems can be. As more is leamed about the range of sys-tens that occur, we are coming to appreciate the variety of mechanisms underly-ing their development. In what follows, an elaborate aspectual system will be described from Cen-tral Alaskan Yup'ik, a language of the Eskimo-Aleut family. Over 40 aspectual distinctions are encoded within the vedal rnorphology. A survey of some of the markers atrlows us to see the kinds of distinctions that can comprise a system, and a spociarl mechanism by which such systems can be elaborated in polysynthetic languages