Habitual and continuous aspects in Sakha

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the habitual and continuous aspects in Sakha (Yakut) language. This study mainly focuses on Sakha, a Turkic language spoken by approximately 360000 speakers in Siberia, Russia. Although genetically Sakha is a Turkic language, it is very different from other Turkic languages due to contact with its neighbouring languages, which are from families such as Mongolic, Tungusic, and Slavic. The aspectual system of Sakha differs from English and other inflectional languages because Sakha is an agglutinating language whereas English or Russian are synthetic. The aspectual system in Sakha is expressed through verbal endings, converbs or other verbal morphology. In this article I discuss two types of aspect: Habitual and Continuous. This study investigates the ways of formation (synthetic and analytical) of different verbal aspects in Sakha, i.e. which way is used to express each aspect. The system I use in this article is based on Comrie’s classification into two main aspects. The category of aspect is hardly found in most studies on Turkic morphology. It is hoped that by focusing on the formation of verbal aspects in Sakha, this article can offer insights into the aspectual system of the Sakha language.