Book chapter
Заметки по лексике хазарско-еврейских документов
This article decides the questions on the etymologisation of the specific personal names, titles, ethnic and place names were found in the manuscripts written in Hebrew and relating to the Khazar Kaganate. So, we can see the new conception on the presence of many borrowings of Caucasian origin in the medieval Khazar-Jewish written sources.
The paper presents a description and an analysis of the nominal complex, a peculiar construction which includes a noun and its modifiers, in West Circassian, a polysynthetic language of the Northwest Caucasian family. The nominal complex shows properties of a single word and tends to follow the template proposed for the word in West Circassian. However, its parts may themselves have a complex structure based on a similar template. This is argued to result from a principle that requires these subparts to be interpreted without appealing to a broader morphological context. In addition, the nominal complex may contain complex syntactic constituents as its proper parts. It is shown that the nominal complex in West Circassian is currently undergoing demorphologization and syntacticization.
This paper discusses the morphological and syntactic means of expression of participants in morphology and syntax of West Circassian (Adyghe) focusing on the argument vs adjunct characteristics of these means. West Circassian provide evidence for the non-discretness of the argument/adjunct contrast but also shows the necessity to distinguish between argument/adjunct properties in morphological expressions and in syntactic expressions.
In the paper, the classes of labile verbs (verbs which can be transitive or intransitive without any formal changes) are analyzed on the data of European and North Caucasian languages. The main conclusion is that there is a semantic difference between classes of labile verbs in the two language groups under analysis. In European languages, predicates with low semantic transitivity are labile (for instance, motion verbs and phasal verbs), while in Caucasian languages, lability is more characteristic of verbs with high semantic transitivity (verbs of destruction and similar verb classes).
The paper discusses two markers of negation in Adyghe (Northwest Caucasian). It is argued that their distribution has functional rather than formal motivation.