Book chapter
Indo-Aryan
This is a short overview of the linguistic features (phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon) of the Indo-Aryan group of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family, with a representative bibliography.
The Indo-Aryan languages (sometimes also referred to, misleadingly and not quite correctly, as Indic, with special focus on Sanskrit) represent the largest group of the Indo-European both by the total number of speakers of the present-day Indo-Aryan languages (approx. one and a half billion of the total three billion speakers of Indo-European languages) and by the number of languages (ca. 225 languages recognized, for instance, by Ethnologue, thus making up more than half of all Indo-European languages listed by this source). The largest Indo-Aryan languages include Hindi and Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Rajasthani and Gujarati. At present, Indo-Aryan languages are spoken, above all, on the Indian subcontinent, also referred to as South Asia.
This article deals with the order of verbal suffixes in Adyghe, a polysynthetic language of the Caucasus. Traditionally the structure of the Adyghe word form and the order of its affixes were described in terms of template morphology. However, we present new data demanding another, substantially different approach. We demonstrate that for the most part suffix ordering within the Adyghe verb follows strictly compositional rules. This feature is a manifestation of the polysynthetic nature of the language.
In the article semantic ordering of valency-changing operations in Adyghe is analyzed. The analysis is focused mainly on the ordering of the causativization with respect to other valency change types. It turns out that causativization, according to morphosyntactic tests, almost always follows any other valency-changing operation.
On the other hand, semantic scope turns out to be distinct from the ordering of derivations. Even when causativization precedes another valency-changing operation, it is not the case that the causative marker is included into the scope of another marker.
The present article continues the investigation of the Soqotri verbal system undertaken by the Russian-Soqotri fieldwork team. The article focuses on the so-called “weak” and “geminated” roots in the basic stem. The investigation is based on the analysis of full paradigms (perfect, imperfect and jussive) of more than 170 “weak” and “geminated” Soqotri verbs.
The paper contains some basic information on the morphology of the Ulap variety of Besleney Kabardian.
The chapter provides the general description of word formation in Adyghe (Northwest Caucasian). Adyghe is a highly polysynthetic language with a very weak distinction between nouns and verbs. Compounding and affixation (including both suffixation and prefixation) are widespread. Morphological means often allow recursion and the order of morphemes depends on the semantics to a large extent. Inflection and derivation are not distinguished clearly. While deverbal nominal derivation is highly developed, most “verbal” formation actually applies to all kinds of bases. Minor parts-of-speech like adjectives and adverbs show dedicated markers. Conversion proper is occasional.
The Caucasus is the place with the greatest linguistic variation in Europe. The present volume explores this variation within the tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality systems in the languages of the North-East Caucasian (or Nakh-Daghestanian) family. The papers of the volume cover the most challenging and typologically interesting features such as aspect and the complicated interaction of aspectual oppositions expressed by stem allomorphy and inflectional paradigms, grammaticalized evidentiality and mirativity, and the semantics of rare verbal categories such as the deliberative (‘May I go?’), the noncurative (‘Let him go, I don’t care’), different types of habituals (gnomic, qualitative, non-generic), and perfective tenses (aorist, perfect, resultative). The book offers an overview of these features in order to gain a broader picture of the verbal semantics covering the whole North-East Caucasian family. At the same time it provides in-depth studies of the most fascinating phenomena.
This volume is a contribution to the typology of the category of aspect. Its aim is bringing forward new empirical data from languages not yet (widely) covered in typological aspectual investigations and to start or broaden their typological discussion. The articles in the paper are grouped in two sections. The first section is an account of aspectual systems of languages in four linguistic areas, including Europe, the Caucasus, Northeast Eurasia, and Africa and the Americas. The second section focusses on specific aspectual categories in individual languages or cross-linguistically.
This book is the first comprehensive study of the Vedic present formations with the suffix ‑ya‑ (‘‑ya-presents’ for short), including both present passives with the accented suffix ‑yá‑ and non-passive -ya-presents with the accent on the root (class IV in the Indian tradition). It offers a complete survey of all ‑ya-presents attested in the Vedic corpus. The main issue in the spotlight of this monograph is the relationship between form (accent placement, diathesis) and function (passive/non-passive) in the system of the -ya-presents – one of the most solidly attested present classes in Sanskrit. One of the aims of the present study is to corroborate the systematic correlation between accent placement and the passive/non-passive distinction: passives bear the accent on the suffix, while non-passives have the accent on the root. The book also focuses on the position of the passive within the system of voices and valency-changing categories in Old Indo-Aryan.