The Optative Mood as a Distinctive Feature of the Albanian Language: A Morphological and Typological Analysis

Abstract

The Albanian language, a distinct branch of the Indo-European family, is renowned for its unique verbal system, particularly the optative mood (Alb. Mënyra dëshirore), a morphologically marked category with significant syntactic and semantic roles. This study provides a rigorous analysis of the optative's morphosyntactic structure, functional properties, and typological implications, drawing on foundational scholarship, including Arbër Çeliku's comparative studies of Albanian-German and Albanian-English verbal systems and Mehmet Çeliku's morphological analyses. Employing a combination of descriptive, comparative, and formal linguistic methodologies, we investigate the optative's inflectional paradigms, its syntactic behaviour in clausal structures, and its pragmatic functions in expressing wishes, blessings, and curses. The optative’s morphological markers are examined within Albanian's verbal system, highlighting their interaction with tense, aspect, and agreement features. Syntactically, the optative operates as a mood-specific functional category, licensing irrealis interpretations in embedded and matrix clauses. Semantically, it encodes speaker-oriented modality, reflecting cultural and pragmatic dimensions of Albanian discourse. Typologically, the optative's retention aligns Albanian with a select group of languages, such as Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, that preserve inflectional optative, offering insights into diachronic processes of mood evolution in Indo-European. This study underscores the optative's contribution to Albanian's linguistic identity and its relevance for cross-linguistic research on mood and modality. By integrating formal and typological perspectives, it advances our understanding of Albanian's verbal system and its place within Indo-European linguistics, appealing to theoretical, historical, and comparative linguists.