Falling verbs in Shughni

The article deals with the system of falling verbs in Shughni, which is one of the Pamir languages of the Southeastern Iranian group. It presents the original data collected from native speakers and the data from Karamshoev’s dictionary [1988], checked during our field work.

The paper argues that the Shughni system of falling verbs, though not dominant in the proper sense of the term, has a central specialized verb wêx̌tow covering the main situations of falling: falling from an elevated surface (a cup from the table), falling of a person, falling of a vertically oriented artifacts like road poles, etc.

There are also several “minor” verbs of falling: for falling with non-vertical trajectory (etymologically opaque phrasal verb ole sittow), for collapsing (čuk ðêdow) or falling accompanied with disintegration, like falling into pieces / fragments or falling of a pipe / heap of objects (nixix̌tow). In addition, there are non-falling verbs which are used for lexification of some important falling frames. For example, the verb of rotation gāx̌tow with the meaning ‘turn’ is used for trees falling because of the strong wind; the verb of upward motion zibidow ‘jump’ is used to denote different situations of detachment of one object from another including parts from wholes, like a damaged wheel being detached from the car during the trip. The causative verb of destruction ðêdow ‘hit’ (which by default denotes aggressive physical effect of one person to another), when applied to falling situations, means falling of an object from above with the clear accent on the result.

The Shughni system reveals the main oppositions relevant for falling verbs cross-linguistically.

However, this system is quite abnormal, because apart of the central verb wêx̌tow it does not have dedicated verbs of falling (with some very marginal exceptions): all the other markers are borrowed from other semantic fields.

It means that Shughni data may serve as an important source for lexical typology illuminating the points of intersection of FALLING with other semantic domains.