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Organized by : Pollet Samvelian and Anaid Donabedian (Labex EFL - Inalco - Sorbonne Nouvelle) / Languages, Dialects and Isoglosses of Anatolia, the Caucasus and Iran

Abstract :

In this paper I discuss a typologically peculiar inverse-like construction found in the polysynthetic ergative Circassian languages of the Northwest-Caucasian family and argue that this construction has been borrowed into Abaza belonging to a different branch of the same family. These languages possess cislocative verbal prefixes, which, in addition to marking the spatial meaning of speaker-orientation, systematically occur 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…