Abaza language

Based on phonological research of 37 Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages, the author proposes for them an original and phonetically complete generalized featural alphabet shaped via peculiar usage of the morphological principles of construction of millennial South Caucasian alphabets. Unlike the phonetically inconsistent Cyrillic alphabets currently in use, it has exceptional properties for precise and alphabetically unequivocal rendition of all phonetic peculiarities of the North Caucasian languages which possess the largest consonant inventory among all languages of the world.

Several basic-lexicon etymologies, with regular sound correspondences, suggest Hurro-Urartian (HU) might be derived from (or related to) Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Preliminary evidence suggests North-Caucasian (NC) languages might also be related to PIE – in particular, to Iranian languages and Armenian.

Основываясь на исследованиях по фонетике северокавказских языков, автор выявляет структурное несоответствие между исключительно богатым консонантизмом данных языков и их нынешними кириллическими алфавитами и, выдвигая идею о необходимости создания собственных и независимых систем письма для 37 западно- и восточнокавказских языков, находящихся под угрозой исчезновения, предлагает совершенно новую, оригинальную и обобщенную алфавитную систему, наделенную высшей степенью графемно-фонемной взаимооднозначности и основанную на принципах знакоформирования и морфологическом применении элементов графики трех исторических алфавитов Южного Кавказа и Армянского Нагорья.

Based on phonological research of 37 Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages, the author proposes for them an original and phonetically complete generalized featural alphabet shaped via peculiar usage of the morphological principles of construction of millennial South Caucasian alphabets. Unlike the phonetically inconsistent Cyrillic alphabets currently in use, it has exceptional properties for precise and alphabetically unequivocal rendition of all phonetic peculiarities of the North Caucasian languages which possess the largest consonant inventory among all languages of the world.

Polysynthesis, broadly understood as extreme morphological complexity of the verb, has been attracting attention of linguists since the advent of linguistic typology in the beginning of the 19th century. Somewhat paradoxically, while the intuition of linguists has to a large extent converged on which languages can be considered “polysynthetic”, the notion itself has so far resisted unequivocal definition. While it is clear that polysynthesis is much more than merely “a high number of morphemes per word” (Mithun 1988 vs. Fortescue 2016), there is no consensus as to which properties usually associated with polysynthesis, e.g. holophrasis, polypersonalism, incorporation, “lexical affixation” etc. are definitional and which should be treated as parameters of variation (e.g. Fortescue 2017 vs. Mattissen 2004, 2006, 2017).
By focusing on the polysynthetic languages of the Northwest Caucasian family (Arkadiev & Lander 2020), on which I have first-hand data, I show how these languages fit within the typology of polysynthesis and in which ways they are special. The most salient polysynthetic feature of Northwest Caucasian is exuberant polypersonalism whereby up to four participants can be expressed by verbal affixes. This is made possible by the existence in these languages of a rich system of applicative prefixes introducing indirect objects of various kinds (cf. “open head marking”, Nichols 2017). A large part of these applicatives express spatial functions and form a cline from genuine “lexical affixes” with a considerable degree of grammaticalisation to incorporated nouns retaining their lexical meaning. These morphological elements have both morphosyntactic and lexical functions, testifying to the lack of clear boundaries between “inflection” and “derivation” (Lander 2016). A large bulk of the Northwest Caucasian morphology serves syntactic purposes. In addition to participant cross-reference and valency-related processes, “syntactic morphology” includes a rich system of marking inter-clausal relations, especially the intricate and typologically unusual encoding of relativisation (Lander & Daniel 2019) employed for externally and internally headed as well as headless relative clauses, the latter serving as the basis for expression of subordination, focus and constituent questions (Caponigro & Polinsky 2011, Arkadiev 2020, Arkadiev & Caponigro 2021).

In this paper we describe a peculiar pattern of case alternation from the polysynthetic Circassian (West Caucasian) languages, where specificity-driven differential marking of noun phrases is attested in all syntactic positions and with the absolutive and the oblique cases alike. We call this phenomenon differential nominal marking (DNM). We show that the presenсe resp. absenсe of overt case marking in Circassian fits in the two-level (DP vs. NP) structural model for nominal constructions and is in some ways similar to the phenomenon of pseudo-incorporation described for various languages with differential object marking. For instance, unmarked nominals in Circassian show number-neutrality and scope inertness with respect to negation and quantifiers. However, DNM in Circassian crucially differs from all known instances of pseudo-incorporation or case alternation in that it is not restricted to any particular syntactic position. We argue that this feature of the Circassian DNM calls all the existing approaches (both functionalist and generative) to the phenomenon of differential case marking in question.

Abaza, a polysynthetic ergative Northwest Caucasian language, possesses a typologically unique system of forming content questions by means of inflectional marking in the verb. I offer a detailed description of this peculiar system showing how it is grounded in the more general pattern of encoding relativization by means of prefixes forming part of the basic cross-referencing paradigms. I also discuss a tentative diachronic scenario explaining how at least a subpart of the synthetic interrogative marking in Abaza (and its close relative Abkhaz) could have emerged via univerbation of pseudocleft focus constructions.

Abaza, a polysynthetic ergative Northwest Caucasian language, shares with its neighbour and distant relative Kabardian a typologically peculiar use of the deictic directional prefixes monitoring the relative ranking of the subject and indirect object on the person hierarchy. In both languages, the cislocative ('hither') prefixes are used if the indirect object outranks the subject on the person hierarchy, and the translocative ('thither') prefixes are used in combinations of first person subjects with second person singular indirect objects. This pattern, reminiscent of the more familiar inverse marking, is observed with ditransitive and bivalent intransitive verbs and is almost fully redundant, since all participants are unequivocally indexed on verbs by pronominal prefixes. I argue that this isogloss, shared by West Circassian (a close relative to Kabardian) but not with Abkhaz, the sister-language of Abaza, is a result of pattern replication under intense language contact , which has led to an increase of both paradigmatic and syntagmatic complexity of Abaza verbal morphology.

We argue that Abaza, a polysynthetic language from the Northwest Caucasian family, exhibits a syntax-semantics mapping that has not been observed in any other languages before. We show that Abaza lacks wh-words and, as a consequence, matrix and embedded wh  interrogative clauses, and conveys direct and indirect content question meaning by means of headless relative clauses. We propose a compositional semantic analysis of these headless relative clauses that assigns them the same meaning as concealed question DPs, i.e. individual concepts. When occurring as matrix clauses and conveying direct question meaning, these headless relative clauses require the relative verbal form to contain a clause typing affix from a specific set. We show that these affixes cannot be analyzed as “incorporated” or “cliticized” wh-words, but rather as operators turning individual concepts into questions,i.e., sets of propositions.

Основываясь на исследованиях по фонетике северокавказских языков, автор выявляет структурное несоответствие между исключительно богатым консонантизмом данных языков и их нынешними кириллическими алфавитами и, выдвигая идею о необходимости создания собственных и независимых систем письма для 37 западно- и восточнокавказских языков, находящихся под угрозой исчезновения, предлагает совершенно новую, оригинальную и обобщенную алфавитную систему, наделенную высшей степенью графемно-фонемной взаимооднозначности и основанную на принципах знакоформирования и морфологическом применении элементов графики трех исторических алфавитов Южного Кавказа и Армянского Нагорья.

This bachelor’s thesis is devoted to verbal suffixation in Abaza, a polysynthetic language belonging to the Northwest Caucasian family. On the basis of fieldwork data collected in 2017–2019, I offer a typologically informed description of suffixes located in the Abaza verb between the root and the markers of tense, and discuss several theoretical issues concerning semantics of the suffixes and their ordering. The first chapter of the study comprises individual grammatical descriptions of each suffix including observations on their semantics and polysemy, compatibility with tenses, peculiarities of their morphological behavior, etc. In the second chapter, I analyze the interaction of suffixes with the event structure of verbs. In the framework of Ramchand’s “first phase syntax”, I show that the interpretations of the ‘again’-marker -χ and the assertive-intensive marker -ʒa are determined by the presence of the resultant state component in the event structure of the verb and the suffixes’ being able to take in their scope either individual components of the event structure or the event structure as a whole. I also offer a schematic representation of these semantic facts in terms of the suffixes’ attachment to different projections in the first phase syntax and hypothesize about possible positions of the other suffixes with respect to event structure. In the third chapter, I discuss restrictions on possible combinations of suffixes and their mutual order. On the basis of the previous analysis of the suffixes’ semantics, I show that their order in the verb form does not always result from their scopal relations. The apparently semantically compatible suffixes often appear to be in a complementary distribution, and even if their combination is permitted, their order is often free. This allows me to formulate the following conclusion about the internal organization of the Abaza verb form: for the affixes whose meanings strongly interact with the event structure, their position in the verb form tends to be fixed, whereas for the affixes with a looser connection with the event structure, their position is rather determined by the general principles of syntax and compositionality.

This Excel file provides a searchable list of Proto-North-Caucasian basic lexicon, incl. reflexes of each proto-form.
Its key source is Starostin & Nikolayev's North Caucasian Etymological Dictionary, whose entries have been transcribed using normalized phonetic symbols (see dedicated sheet for details).
This database is intended as a stepping stone for researchers who want to try and understand the origin of North Caucasian languages by comparing their basic lexicon against other languages and language families.

Northwest Caucasian (NWC) languages have usually been considered to lack noun incorporation (NI). Indeed, they do not feature structures considered prototypical NI as familiar from such languages as Iroquoian or Chukotkan, i.e. optional productive compounding of the verb with the root of its P or S argument under specific discourse conditions with consequences for transitivity. However, I argue that NWC still shows phenomena amenable to an NI analysis, i.e. the so-called spatial preverbs, many of which not only historically go back to incorporated nouns, but may be analysed as such synchronically as well, albeit under a broad understanding of NI. In my talk, I shall focus on two types of incorporated nouns in Abaza, a member of the Abkhaz-Abaza branch of NWC, i.e. body-part nouns and non-relational nouns, discussing similarities and differences in their semantics and morphosyntactic behaviour, drawing parallels from other languages of the family. I shall argue that Abaza and, more broadly, NWC spatial preverbs form a cline from incorporated nouns to fully grammaticalised lexical affixes, suggesting several successive stages of incorporation and ensuing affixalisation.

In this paper I discuss a typologically peculiar inverse-like construction found in the polysynthetic ergative Circassian languages of the Northwest-Caucasian family and will argue that this construction has been borrowed into Abaza belonging to a different branch of the same family. These languages possess a cislocative verbal prefix, which, in addition to marking the spatial meaning of speaker-orientation, systematically occurs in polyvalent verbs when the object outranks the subject on the person hierarchy. The inverse-like use of the cislocative in Circassian differs from the “canonical” direct-inverse system in that, first, it is fully redundant since the person-role linking is achieved by means of the person markers themselves and, second, it does not occur in the basic transitive construction, featuring instead in configurations involving an indirect object both in ditransitive and bivalent intransitive verbs. I argue that the similar use of the cislocative prefix observed in Abaza is a result of pattern-borrowing from Kabardian, with which Abaza has been in intense contact, and that this borrowing has resulted in the increase of both paradigmatic and syntagmatic complexity of Abaza verbal morphology.

This paper investigates the resultative constructions in the polysynthetic ergative Northwest Caucasian languages West Circassian, Kabardian and Abaza and shows that they are undergoing a development into the domain of passive. Two pathways of such development are outlined: (i) via direct extension of the resultative manifested in its compatibility with dynamic and agent-related modifiers (in all three languages); (ii) via an inceptive derivation (only in Abaza). Typological parallels to both of these from better-known European languages are discussed.

Основываясь на исследованиях по фонетике северокавказских языков, автор выявляет структурное несоответствие между исключительно богатым консонантизмом данных языков и их нынешними кириллическими алфавитами и, выдвигая идею о необходимости создания собственных и независимых систем письма для 37 западно- и восточнокавказских языков, находящихся под угрозой исчезновения, предлагает совершенно новую, оригинальную и обобщенную алфавитную систему, наделенную высшей степенью графемно-фонемной взаимооднозначности и основанную на принципах знакоформирования и морфологическом применении элементов графики трех исторических алфавитов Южного Кавказа и Армянского Нагорья.

Based on phonological research of 37 Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages, the author proposes for them an original and phonetically complete generalized featural alphabet shaped via peculiar usage of the morphological principles of construction of millennial South Caucasian alphabets. Unlike the phonetically inconsistent Cyrillic alphabets currently in use, it has exceptional properties for precise and alphabetically unequivocal rendition of all phonetic peculiarities of the North Caucasian languages which possess the largest consonant inventory among all languages of the world.

The paper analyzes the children's vocabulary (baby talk) in the Abaza language, which is a member of small Abkhazo-Adyghean (West Caucasian) linguistic family. The phonetic processes and morphological means of the derivation of children's forms out of adult words are discussed. The paper provides a corpus of children's vocabulary in the Abaza language.

Many Austronesian languages exhibit a type of verbal inflection known as ‘voice’ or ‘focus,’ which, in a descriptive sense, tracks the grammatical role of the topic or relativized phrase of a given clause. New comparative data reveals that such affixal alternations are best analyzed as the morphological reflex of separate Agree operations targeting one and the same goal (topic/relativized phrase), demonstrating a feature of discourse configurationality (Li & Thompson 1976; Miyagawa 2010) and a case of parallel chain relations (Chomsky 2005) spelled out as verbal morphology. A similar type of portmanteau verbal inflections is found in western Nilotic and Caucasian, with four loci of variation attested:(a) the type of A-bar operation that triggers the verbal inflection,(b) number of voice distinctions (i.e. how many and which parallel chain relations are realized as verbal morphology), (c) presence or absence of φ-feature agreement with the goal, and (d) whether or not the goal undergoes overt A-bar movement. This observation from Austronesian and beyond suggests that φ-feature agreement with the goal is not the only available morphological means for indexing abstract Agree relations in narrow syntax, and that what is known as Austronesian-style voice or wh-agreement constitutes an understudied type of agreement morphology that serves a similar purpose.

In this paper we describe a peculiar pattern of case alternation from the polysynthetic Circassian (West Caucasian) languages, where specificity-driven differential marking of noun phrases is attested in all syntactic positions and with the absolutive and the oblique cases alike. We call this phenomenon differential nominal marking (DNM). We show that the presenсe resp. absenсe of overt case marking in Circassian fits in the two-level (DP vs. NP) structural model for nominal constructions and is in some ways similar to the phenomenon of pseudo-incorporation described for various languages with differential object marking. For instance, unmarked nominals in Circassian show number-neutrality and scope inertness with respect to negation and quantifiers. However, DNM in Circassian crucially differs from all known instances of pseudo-incorporation or case alternation in that it is not restricted to any particular syntactic position. We argue that this feature of the Circassian DNM calls ...