a comparison among aspect markers in balochi dialects of turkmenistan, afghanistan, sistani sarhadi, granchin sarhadi, sarawani, and koroshi

the present study is a comparison among aspect markers in balochi dialects spoken in turkmenistan, afghanistan, sistan (sarhadi), granchin (sarhadi), sarawan, and fars (koroshi balochi). the theoretical models used are comrie (1976, 1985) and bhat.(1999). the oral texts used as language data, which made up the corpus for analysing aspect markers in koroshi, were collected from different parts of fars province during several field journeys in the period between february 2008 to april 2009 and the oral texts used as language data for analysing aspect markers in sistani balochi were collected from different parts of sistan during several field journeys in the period between february 2009 to may 2010. the main part of the material consists of folktales, life stories and procedural texts (how to cook, how to weave, etc.) told by male and female linguistic consultants (20 persons) of different ages (between the ages of 40 and 90) with different social backgrounds. after recording the linguistic data (in wav format), the texts were reduced to written form by means of a phonological transcription. language data and examples for this aim for other dialects were extracted from published papers and books. there are two aspects in all the dialects mentioned: perfective (unmarked) and imperfective (marked), and the verbal clitics = a and marginally k= markers of imperfective aspect. it is, however, very interesting to note that in koroshi balochi dialect there is a different structure in addition to the verbal clitic =a (which also appears attached to the verb as a proclitic a= in koroshi) which also shows imperfective aspect, namely a construction with ma-). both these constructions are parallel. in the present temporal field, koroshi shows a structure for progressive aspect that is not found in any other dialects of balochi studied so far except in koroshi and lashari balochi (yusefian 1382). in some of the dialects studied in this research such as sistani balochi and balochi of granchin there are two different structures in imperfective progressive/ingressive aspect both in the past and present temporal field, which are used side by side by consultants. the second structure shows the influence of persian. in sarawani dialect there is one structure indicating imperfective progressive/ingressive aspect, which also shows the influence of persian but in balochi of turkmenistan and afghanistan there is only the inherent balochi structure for this aspect. perfective aspect in all these dialects is unmarked and is formed with the past stem plus personal endings or agent clitics.