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Decreasing valency-changing operations in a valency-increasing language?
The paper discusses valency-changing operations in West Circassian (Adyghe), a polysynthetic language of the North Caucasus. West Circassian is a strongly valency-increasing language, which has many means that add arguments to the subcategorization frame of a predicate. Despite this, the language also seems to have several valency-changing operations which could be regarded as either eliminating some of the arguments or deriving intransitive verbs from transitive verbs. Yet, on a closer inspection such operations turn out not to be necessarily valency-reducing and/or transitivity-changing. The West Circassian data show that valency changing should not be tied with changing transitivity, as is sometimes proposed in the linguistic literature.