Draft: 2/8/2018 Perfect and resultative in Tocharian Ilja A. Seržant Leipzig University Abstract Keywords Tocharian, perfect, resultative, orientation 1. Introduction Tocharian – Tocharian A (henceforth TA) and Tocharian B (TB) – are the most eastern Indo- European languages originally spoken in the northern part of the Tarim Basin (Xinjiang region, China). Tocharian B has a number of diachronically and diatopically grounded varieties (cf. Malzahn 2007; Peyrot 2008), traditionally referred to in the literature by the place of provenience such as Ming-Öy-Qizil, Šorcuq, etc. The texts attested in this language are from the time period from 5 th to 8 th AD. The decipherment of Tocharian by the two German indologists Emil Sieg and Wilhelm Siegling dates back to 1908 (see Sieg & Siegling 1908[1916]). The Tocharian past tense system functionally consists of three main categories: the preterit, imperfect and the periphrastic construction. The latter is based on a set of auxiliaries all stemming from verbs with the original (and still attested) meaning ‘to be’ and the lexical verb being nominalized in the form of the past participle (PP, traditionally preterite participle), henceforth the PP construction. The relevant morphological patterns for the preterit – but also some imperfects in Tocharian A and the PPs – are highly complex and there is considerable amount of allomorphy and, especially in the preterit, of suppletion. 1 The function of the preterit – the most frequent past tense form in the texts – is that of an aorist (perfective past) and, rarer, of a perfect (Thomas 1957; cf. §5.6 below). The exact range of its actional and aspectual properties still awaits a comprehensive investigation. Historically, the Tocharian preterit is the result of an earlier merger of the morphological aorist and perfect patterns of Proto-Indo- European (see inter alia, Adams 1978: 282; 1988: 82; Ringe 1990; Winter 1994; Hackstein 2005; cf. the overview in Malzahn 2010: 208-14). Thus, many Tocharian preterit forms go back to Proto-Indo-European aorists of the respective verbs (cf. various entries in LIV 2 ). The very morphological pattern of the Tocharian preterit III rests on the morphological pattern of the s- aorist of Proto-Indo-European: it employs the vowel gradation typical of Proto-Indo-European s-aorists (cf. Narten 1964) as well as he suffix/ending -s (Ringe 1990). Thus, functionally, Tocharian is very much similar to Latin in its development of the Proto-Indo-European aorists and perfects which merged into a perfective past (traditionally referred to as perfect in Latin grammars) while the imperfect is a new category not inherited from Proto-Indo-European in neither of the two. The present study sets out to describe the function and syntactic properties of the PP construction and crucially relies on Thomas (1957: 244–306) and Seržant (2016) while the morphological peculiarities of the PP formation as well as the different forms of the auxiliaries are not in the scope of this paper. Yet, it is not an easy task to describe function and syntax of a category in a dead language. Therefore, methodologically, I will provide two types of 1 The reader is referred to Malzahn (2010) which is the most extensive morphological treatment of Tocharian verb forms in both synchronic and diachronic perspective.