Details

General

Description and behaviour

The meaning of this affix is difficult to pin down, because it has no less than three different meanings:

• past/perfective tense, i.e. the action happened in the past, or that it happened prior to the current time frame being discussed.
• perfect(ive) aspect, i.e. the action is completed, and/or it resulted in a continuing state.
• evidential aspect, i.e. the action was not directly experienced by the speaker, e.g. because it was reported to him, or because he infers it from observing other facts.

This is complicated, because the affix may not always denote all three different meanings simultaneously. As Fortescue (1984, p. 272) notes: "[In the absence of disambiguating markers], the meaning of -sima- will often be taken as a conflation of all three senses; i.e. that the speaker is describing something that happened in the past, is completed (with continuing result of some sort), and was not witnessed directly by himself". However, if there is another temporal affix present in the stem before V{sima}V, such as e.g. V{ssa}V , then V{sima}V will only denote 'evidential aspect', but not the temporal sense; i.e. it will only denote that the action was reported/inferred, and that it was completed. Hence, V{sima}V can also be used for even future events. Compare for example the following examples:

• aqagu tikissasimavoq, 'tomorrow he will probably have come', with V{ssa}V occurring before V{sima}V, so the meaning is only perfective and evidential, thus expressing some doubt;
• aqagu tikisimassaaq, 'tomorrow he will have come', with V{sima}V occurring before V{ssa}V, which only has the perfective sense (or future perfect time), thus expressing certainty that the event will happen (i.e. that in the future it will have been completed).

However, it may not always be desirable to add another temporal affix in order to disambiguate the meaning of this affix, and because of this ambiguity, some speakers prefer to use other affixes instead of V{sima}V, which have some of the same meanings, but not all of them. In particular:

• V{nəkuu}V, which denotes past/perfect tense, but not evidential aspect. However, this is a quite new formation, and not all speakers accept it.
• V{-riiq}V, which denotes perfective aspect (completed action), but experiential rather than evidential aspect; i.e. the speaker observed the event himself. This may even be combined with V{sima}V as -reersima- for emphasis, according to Fortescue (1984, p. 278).

To further complicate matters, V{sima}V seems in some cases also to be able to passivize a divalent stem. Fortescue (1984, p. 266) gives the following example:

• allappaa, 'he writes it';
• allappoq, 'he writes', i.e. the stem is agentive, so the meaning is still active with intransitive endings;
• allassimavoq, 'it is written'.

However, it is not clear when the effect of this affix is passivizing, and it does not seem to be regular nowadays, although it may be found in lexicalised words and phrases. Thus we do not record it as valency-decreasing here.

The affix is normally additive, but it seems to be truncative on t-stems, in particular in older texts. This behaviour may not be regular nowadays, but it can be seen in lexicalised words containing this affix.

Meanings and examples

References

• [3] Michael Fortescue (1984): West Greenlandic (Croom Helm Descriptive Grammars).
• [4] C.W. Schultz-Lorentzen (1958): Den Grønlandske Ordbog.
• [8] Christian Berthelsen, Birgitte Jakobsen, Robert Petersen, Inge Kleivan & Jørgen Rischel (1997): Oqaatsit.