1 The semantics of verbal categories in Nakh-Daghestanian languages: Tense, aspect, evidentiality, mood/modality Diana Forker JCU / University of Bamberg 1. Introduction Virtually all sentences carry information about tense, aspect, modality, and in many languages also evidentiality. Within individual languages, these domains are commonly formally and functionally interrelated. This raises questions about the categorization and the status of the forms and how can we deal with them when writing grammars of specific languages, especially when there is no established research tradition for the languages in question. Nakh-Daghestanian languages represent an understudied language family, but during the last 20 years more and more descriptive grammars have been published. We are now in a position of having already a good understanding of the grammars of many individual languages and can start with fine-grained investigations of the semantic categories, an area not easily to master at the beginning of the investigation of a previously undescribed language. Within the study of Nakh-Daghestanian the semantics of tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality is a generally neglected topic. Up to now research has been primarily focused on the morphosyntactic properties of verbal categories (see the volume published by Authier & Maisak 2011). However, it is a promising area, not only because of its complexity, but also because Nakh-Daghestanian languages have many rare and typologically interesting sematic categories within the realm of tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality. 2. The Nakh-Daghestanian languages The Caucasus is the place with the greatest linguistic variation in Europe. It is an area with high genealogical and high structural diversity. Within the Caucasus, the Nakh- Daghestanian (also called East Caucasian or North-East Caucasian) family is the largest autochthonous language family consisting of more than 30 languages. Nakh-Daghestanian languages are spoken in the southern parts of Russia, in northern Azerbaijan and a few speech communities are found in Georgia. The largest language of this family, Chechen, with more than one million speakers, is the official language of the Chechen Republic and widely used as means of communication for every aspects of daily life in Chechnya (private communication, education, media, administration, etc.). In contrast, small languages such as Hinuq, Archi, Khinalugh or many Dargi varieties are exclusively used for oral