just to keep track of what was in the QA today post-verbal object isn't always topicalized. a recent study is looking into what these preferences/tendencies are: Samvelian, P., P. Faghiri & V. Khurshudyan (to appear). On the persistence of SVO: The case of Modern Eastern Armenian. To appear in Linguistics.

Just to write down what was in the chat. 1) negation of a synthetic verb means just adding the neg prefix to the verb, and the negated verb takes intonational focus: I wrote books [jes giɾkʰ gəɾetsi] "i book wrote". I didnt write books [jes giɾkʰ tʃə-gəɾetsi] 'i boo not-wrote'. 2) for periphrastic tenses, the neg is added to the aux and we see verb-aux inversion: I write [jes gəɾum em] 'i writing am'. I am not writing [jes tʃ-em gəɾum] 'i not-am writing'

Proper names usually take the Def marker. Like "Mary is home" is [marja-n dun e] "mary-def home is".

Hiya :) just to 'memorialize' the QA from today For the general system. Classical Armenian was fusional for Case/PL, not much of a Det system. The Case/PL I think are often treated as descending from PIE -- there's a bunch of classical work on this stuff, especially textbooks on Classical Armenian like Godel 1975 "intro to classical armenian". The dialects went towards turning this fusional system to agglutinative -- surveyed in the Donabedian 2018 article For the individual inflection slots: For the PL, the modern -er/-ner likely developed around the Medieval error. Classical Armenian had more fusional case/number. The er/ner likely developed from collective markers. For case, the modern case suffixes are reflexes of Classical case suffixes, but with a lot of simplification. The Classical system had extreme syncretism and class-based variation (see Caha 2013 "Explaining the structure of case paradigms by the mechanisms of Nanosyntax". The modern lects simplified these. For the Det slow, the Def and Poss suffixes are all reflexes of diexis markers -- -s was proximal (now 1SG poss), -t/d was medial (now 2SG poss), and -n/ə was distal (now Def) -- Katherine's got a paper in review about the Det system's development