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8 Verbs<br />
Table 8.10: Class marking suffixes and person/number suffixes for potential verb<br />
forms<br />
sg du pl<br />
1 st -a-v -e-n -e-p<br />
2 nd -a -ä-hpen -e-hpit<br />
3 rd -a -ä-ba -e<br />
to imperative or tense-marked forms, is treated as such in the present study.<br />
However, three morphosyntactic aspects <strong>of</strong> potential mood verb forms make<br />
its classification as an inflectional category potentially questionable. First, verbs<br />
in the potential mood feature a segmentally separable marker (-tj-), rather than<br />
being part <strong>of</strong> a portmanteau morpheme simultaneously indicating mood/tense,<br />
number and normally person as is the case for other tenses and moods. Second,<br />
the stem allomorph chosen in all potential forms is consistently the weak<br />
form, which is quite consistent with the morphosyntactic behavior <strong>of</strong> other derived<br />
verbs which consistently have a specific consonant gradation type, while<br />
the mood and tense paradigms for non-derived verbs contain both strong and<br />
weak stem allomorphs. Finally, it is striking that the potential mood class marking<br />
suffixes and person/number suffixes (listed in Table 8.10) are homophonous<br />
with the class marking and present tense person/number suffixes for Class V<br />
verbs (cf. Table 8.23 on page 177). 10 In all <strong>of</strong> these three aspects, the potential<br />
forms <strong>of</strong> verbs are identical in behavior to a number <strong>of</strong> derivational verb forms<br />
(cf. §10.2.1, §10.2.2 and §10.2.3), and unlike other inflectional tense/mood forms.<br />
At this point, the only morphological motivation to classify the potential mood as<br />
an inflectional category is its complementary distribution with other tense and<br />
mood forms. These characteristics are summarized in Table 8.11 on the facing<br />
page.<br />
10 Note that 3sg potential forms in Lehtiranta (1992: 150–154) do not have a class marker or<br />
person/number suffix. This deviates from the 3sg.prs forms <strong>of</strong> Class V verbs (even though<br />
Lehtiranta (1992: 88) mentions that the potential forms are inflected in the same way as indicative<br />
present forms). On the other hand, all instances <strong>of</strong> 3sg potential forms in the <strong>Pite</strong> <strong>Saami</strong><br />
Documentation Project corpus are marked with -a, just like the 3sg.prs forms <strong>of</strong> Class V verbs.<br />
Perhaps this 3sg potential marker is a recent change to the <strong>Pite</strong> <strong>Saami</strong> potential verb forms<br />
based on analogy to these present tense forms.<br />
166
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