Grammaticalization of the intensifier fyr as a marker of internal nominal cause in Ossetic

In this paper, we discuss the Ossetic marker fyr, which is described in dictionaries as an intensifier with the meaning ‘very’. We show that, in the modern language, this element is losing its intensifying semantics and has been grammaticalized, when used with a noun in the ablative, as a marker of internal nominal causation. Our field data demonstrate that the use of fyr in causal contexts becomes obligatory, but the use of this marker as an intensifier in other contexts is, in contrast, ruled out. The field data are confirmed by the analysis of the data of the Ossetic National Corpus, according to which fyr is used almost exclusively with ablative forms of nouns belonging to classes connected to the semantics of internal causation. Etymological data show that the original meaning of fyr is the intensifying one; of all Iranian languages, this marker received a causal interpretation only in Ossetic. At the same time, neither the development of an intensifier into a causal marker, nor the presence of a specialized marker for this meaning, is attested in typological works on causal markers.