Lezgian (Nakh‑Dagestanian, Lezgic)

With some verbs, the morphological future is synonymous with the (unmarked) imperfect. To express the future, a periphrastic form is used.

1 Deponency in Lezgian

The ending -da is used for the future tense (or habitual, as in 'whenever there is talk about good meals, saliva ^{always comes} to Mizafer's mouth'; p. 141). But with the irregular stative verbs k'an- 'want', kič'e- 'be afraid', či- ‘know' and t'a- ‘hurt', forms in -da simply have a present state meaning, and are functionally equivalent to imperfective forms in -zawa:

In order to express the future, these verbs use the auxiliary 'be' in its future tense form:

(These verbs also share the property of lacking a masdar and aorist stem.)

Early accounts of Lezgian speak of a predicative suffix -da, attached to adjectives, thus čimi 'warm' ~ čimida '(it) is warm', but its only traces in the modern standard language are the verbs cited above. Since two of these, k'an- 'want' and kič'e- 'be afraid', are still used as adjectival as well, it can be assumed that this whole subclass of verbs was originally deadjectival. Haspelmath speculates (p. 116) that -da was originally a copula with a general non-past meaning, later supplanted in part of its semantic range by the more recent imperfective. The originally deadjectival verbs could then be seen as retaining the original function of -da.