The Lakota aspect/modality markers -kinica and tkhá

Developments of aspectual out of modal grammemes do not appear to be sufficiently documented in the extant literature on grammaticalization. The Native American language Lakota is equipped with two grammatical elements which encode both aspectual and modal concepts: -kinica ‘‘proximative, intentional’’ and the highly polysemous tkhá ‘‘proximative, past completive, past counterfactual, past obligative, past suppositive’’. This study investigates the diachronic connections between the various meanings of these grammemes, in particular, with regard to evidence for direct grammaticalization links between their aspectual and modal meanings