The auxiliary verb in Eastern Armenian is a clitic that carries tense and agreement and is used to form all the indicative forms of the verb with the exception of the aorist tense. Although the auxiliary typically follows the participle, it is also able to be fronted and attached to various, seemingly unrelated elements such as the direct object, the manner adverb, the first component of a compound verb, negation, and questioned elements or wh-phrases in the clause. The close relationship between the auxiliary and contrastive focus has been noted by several researchers (Comrie 1984, Tamrazian 1994, Tragut 2009). A purely focus-based analysis of the auxiliary, however, fails to explain the obligatory fronting of the auxiliary in neutral sentences involving nonspecific objects, measure adverbs, and preverbs. The goal of this paper is to account for the puzzling positional distribution of the auxiliary clitic. A closer investigation reveals that the elements that host the auxiliary in neutral sentences occupy the leftmost position within the vP domain, while the marked elements are in a focus position and are structurally higher in the sentence (cf. Kahnemuyipour and Megerdoomian 2010). The paper then contrasts the Armenian data to the mobile auxiliary clitics in Udi (Harris 2002) and Talyshi (Stilo 2008) where similar phenomena have been noted, pointing to the possibility of focus-marking auxiliaries as an areal feature in the southern Caucasus.