Arealità e diasistemi. Il caso dell’armeno

Within a perspective in which the Armenian language, in its history, is conceived as a sort of diasystem, specific morphosyntactic structures have been collected and commented that are difficult to place within a single framework of linguistic typology. In Armenian, in fact, from the very first statements, the lack of agreement between adjective and noun reference is merging, as well as some pattern of case markers are indicated according to a system of agglutination. This paper also makes specific reference to the encoding of the subject in cases other than the nominative. The phenomena suggest a typological alignment structure of the (split) ergative type. This is evident, e.g., for the perfect periphrastic construction with the participle or for other constructions with the infinitive and the subject marked with the genitive. The are also other interesting processes of grammaticalization, like those regarding particles and verbal forms. Those processes produce a new distribution of markers of tense, mood and aspect in the verbal system. These different structures of the Armenian are treated as phenomena induced by language contact, but without resorting to the theory of a difficult (Kartvelian) Sprachbund.