Locative clauses and existential constructions in Khowar

Sammanfattning: The current study investigates how locative clauses and existential constructions are realized and differentiated in the language of Khowar [ISO 693–3: khw] (Hindu Kush Indo-Aryan, HKIA). Khowar is one of several under-researched languages in the Hindu Kush, and as of yet there is no comprehensive description of its linguistic structure. The data for this study was provided by Afsar Ali Khan (local linguist and native speaker of Khowar), in the form of a collection of transcribed traditional Khowar stories, told by speakers in the community. Samples of locative clauses and existential constructions were collected from the corpus, mainly by use of the concordance tool of Toolbox, after which an analysis was carried out. The results show that word order is the main strategy for differentiating locational-existential constructions and locative clauses in Khowar, that semantically bleached posture verbs are not a present strategy for creating locative clauses nor existential constructions, and that there are certain story-opening sequences with existential constructions that are typical of the genre represented by the data. Future research is suggested to focus on negative existentials in Khowar, the full distributional pattern of the actual and inferential copula in other types of non-verbal predication, and the extended use of the 3rd person singular past tense form of the actual copula, ɔʃɔj, which is no longer sensitive to the animacy distinction otherwise present in the Khowar verbal system.