This volume presents the original text, accompanied by an English translation and commentary, of a hitherto unpublished Syriac composition, entitled the Marvels Found in the Great Cities and in the Seas and on the Islands. Produced by an unknown East Syrian Christian author during the late medieval or early modern period, this work offers a loosely organized catalogue of marvellous events, phenomena, and objects, natural as well as human-made, found throughout the world. The Marvels is a unique composition in that it bears witness to the creative adoption by Syriac Christians of the paradoxographical literary mode of ‘aǧā’ib that enjoyed great popularity among their Arabic- and Persian-speaking Muslim neighbours. In this composition, the East Syrian author blends together a number of different paradoxographical traditions: some inherited from the earlier Christian works in Syriac, such as the Alexander Romance, some borrowed directly or indirectly from Muslim geographical and other works, and some, apparently, circulating as a part of local oral lore. Combining entertainment and didacticism, he provides his audience with a fascinating panorama of imaginary geography, which at the same time has unmistakable Christian features.

This edition makes a fascinating Syriac work available to a wider audience, and provides detailed insights into the rich assortment of traditions creatively woven together by its author. Thanks to the combination of the original text, English translation and commentary, it will be of interest to scholars and readers alike.

Chapters gathered in Syriac Hagiography: Texts and Beyond explore a wide range of Syriac hagiographical works, while following two complementary methodological approaches, i.e. literary and cultic, or formal and functional. Grouped into three main sections, these contributions reflect three interrelated ways in which we can read Syriac hagiography and further grasp its characteristics: “Texts as Literature” seeks to unfold the mechanisms of their literary composition; “Saints Textualized” offers a different perspective on the role played by hagiographical texts in the invention and/or maintenance of the cult of a particular saint or group of saints; “Beyond the Texts” presents cases in which the historical reality behind the nexus of hagiographical texts and veneration of saints can be observed in greater details.

In Memory and Identity in the Syriac Cave of Treasures: Rewriting the Bible in Sasanian Iran Sergey Minov examines literary and socio-cultural aspects of the Syriac pseudepigraphic composition known as the Cave of Treasures, which offers a peculiar version of the Christian history of salvation. The book fills a lacuna in the history of Syriac Christian literary creativity by contextualising this unique work within the cultural and religious situation of Sasanian Mesopotamia towards the end of Late Antiquity. The author analyses the Cave’s content and message from the perspective of identity theory and memory studies, while discussing its author’s emphatically polemical stand vis-à-vis Judaism, the ambivalent way in which he deals with Iranian culture, and the promotion in this work of a distinctively Syriac-oriented vision of the biblical past.

The title coinage of this book, stimulacra , refers to the fundamental capacity of literary narrative to stimulate our minds and senses by simulating things through words. Musical stimulacra are passages of fi ction that readers are empowered to transpose into mental simulations of music. The book theorizes how fi ction can generate musical experience, explains what constitutes that experience, and explores the musical dimensions of three American novels: William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central (2005), William H. Gass’s Middle C (2013), and Richard Powers’s Orfeo (2014). Musical Stimulacra approaches fiction’s music from a readerly perspective. Instead of looking at how novels forever fail to compensate for music’s physical, structural, and affective properties, the book concentrates on what literary narrative can do musically. Negotiating common grounds for cognitive audionarratology and intermediality studies, Musical Stimulacra builds its case on the assumption that, among other things, fiction urges us to listen— to musical words and worlds.

The volume is devoted to the typology of the category of number in the world's languages.

Despite the fact that culture, aesthetics, and art were some of the main concerns of early classical sociology (e.g., Simmel’s essays are probably the most popular reference in this regard), later culture has become a matter of interest of a sub-discipline, that of the sociology of culture. The end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries brought a radical transformation of sociological understanding of culture, and it was Jeffrey Alexander who revived the notion and proposed a new understanding of sociological theory drawn on this notion. According to Alexander, culture should be treated as an autonomous realm being able to act and contribute to the social order. In (re)turning to this understanding, Alexander draws upon a variety of now-classical theories, but mainly on Durkheim’s theory of religion as explicated in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Clifford Geertz and his idea of thick description is one of the sources for the renewed cultural sociology. In Art as a Cultural System (1976), he wrote that “to study an art form is to explore a sensibility” and “such a sensibility is essentially a collective formation, and that the foundations of such a formation are as wide as social existence and as deep”. The special issue of the RSR is dedicated to empirical and theoretical discussion of how art can serve as a source of sociological imagination. 

This issue of the Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik is comprising the full papers of the international symposium on Gothic language, history and culture “The Goths Compared: East Germanic communities between Balticum, Pontus and the West” which was held on November 5–6, 2019 at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (hse) in Moscow. The symposium was organised by the Centre for Medieval Studies, HSE.

Game of Business is a textbook designed to upgrade speaking, reading, listening and writing skills of bachelor and master students in professional business English discourse. It can be used in a variety of Management programs, in groups of upper-intermediate to advanced levels. It is centered around the topic of start-ups and addresses a range of issues related to establishing a business in four different industries - Tourism, Arts & Culture, Food & Beverages and Sports.

The textbook focuses on developing speech skills such as writing and speaking by building up a vocabulary within given topics with the highest frequency in the IELTS exam. The proposed texts and exercises form and consolidate the ability of students to speak and write on given topics in the style of scientific discourse. The book can be used as a textbook for individual and group learning acivities, in the classroom and as a self-study, to improve English up to B2, C2, C2, and to achieve higher scores on the IELTS International Exam.

Akkadian, the oldest surviving Semitic language and one of the most important Ancient Near Eastern languages, is one of the best documented languages of the ancient world. This nine volume encyclopedic set presents a detailed compendium of Akkadian vocabulary that will prove a vital resource for students and scholars of language, Ancient Near Eastern studies, and all those with a wider interest in Akkadian writings.

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The volume includes chapters devoted to various aspects of Caucasian languages.

The title of the book refers to the sociological survey, conducted by the "Public opinion" Fund in 2000. It is focused on the representation of Internet as a complex phenomenon in modern Russia. First, the Internet is considered as part of the media system that not only rapidly developing, but also significantly transforming the system as a whole. Second, it contains the analysis of main online markets in Russia. Thirdly, the Internet is analyzed in political, social and cultural contexts.

The textbook focuses on developing speech skills such as writing and speaking by building up a vocabulary within given topics with the highest frequency in the IELTS exam. The proposed texts and exercises form and consolidate the ability of students to speak and write on given topics in the style of scientific discourse. The book can be used as a textbook for individual and group learning acivities, in the classroom and as a self-study, to improve English up to B2, C2, C2, and to achieve higher scores on the IELTS International Exam.

This pioneering volume explores the Arctic as an important and highly endangered archive of knowledge about natural as well as human history of the anthropocene.

Focusing on the Arctic as an archive means to investigate it not only as a place of human history and memory – of Arctic exploring, ›conquering‹ and colonizing –, but to take into account also the specific environmental conditions of the circumpolar region: ice and permafrost. These have allowed a huge natural archive to emerge, offering rich sources for natural scientists and historians alike.

Examining the debate on the notion of (›natural‹) archive, the cultural semantics and historicity of the meaning of concepts like ›warm‹, ›cold‹, ›freezing‹ and ›melting‹ as well as various works of literature, art and science on Arctic topics, this volume brings together literary scholars, historians of knowledge and philosophy, art historians, media theorists and archivologists.

The book includes 64 papers submitted to the International conference in computer linguistics and intellectual technologies Dialogue 2019 and presents a broad spectrum of theoretical and applied research of natural language description, language simulation, and creation of applied computer technologies.

This study aims to investigate the effect of peer-assisted prewriting discussion on second language (L2) academic writing and its benefits for students with different proficiency levels. While there is a significant body of research exploring the positive impact of collaboration on L2 writers' written performance and the ways it could be organised, there is little practical consideration on how to formulate explicit instruction. The rationale for this research lies in designing and arranging such explicit instruction which could lead to L2 learners producing a higher quality writing output. Based on the qualitative and quantitative methods and drawn on the students’ written texts and data analysis, the current study was conducted to devise and to test a proposed model, which the author will term the ‘collaborative discussion model’ (the CDM).  The control and experimental groups of Russian EFL students (n = 48), organised in a specific way, were engaged in written assignments after naturally occurring discussion and then the latter was involved in the instruction-led discussion. The practice writing tasks were rated with the analytic rubric used in IELTS, assessing task response, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, and grammatical range. The findings suggest that collaborative prewriting tasks, accomplished in the experimental group of students with different levels of L2 proficiency, may encourage students to engage more in reflection about the content and language of the text. As the texts produced after introducing the CDM were scored higher, especially on the criteria of task response and lexical resource, it is suggested that scaffolding prewriting discussion can potentially augment the writing skills of learners and the CDM can be used as a complementary activity to address challenges associated with academic writing. The results of the questionnaire can imply that there are benefits of explicit instruction for students with different levels of L2 proficiency, although in nuanced ways and different degrees.

The present study considers the function of the pattern of the so-called stem IV, primarily associated with causatives, in Soqotri (Modern South Arabian). It focuses on the correlation between the semantics of the source verb and that of the derived verb, examines the semantic classes which are compatible with the causative morpheme, and establishes several factors which influence the employment of stem IV. A special subsection deals with syntax of stem IV verbs.

Academic Bibliography of Syriac and Christian Arabic Studies in Russian published in 2020.

This introduction to the cluster seeks to reestablish “peasant studies” as not only a historical but also a literary subfield of investigation in Slavic Studies. The representation of peasants in mid-nineteenth-century Russian literature is regarded in this article as an issue of sociological poetics, cultural history, and institutional theory. The authors give a critical overview of well-known and recent scholarship on the images and depiction of peasants and the narod in Russian literature and propose an interdisciplinary combination of approaches to the topic.

In this paper, I consider double causatives in Mehweb, a one village language spoken in Daghestan, Russia, and belonging to the Dargwa branch of East Caucasian. The capability of stacking two causative suffixes seems to be lexically restricted, and mapping onto verbal meanings that are typically P-labile in the languages of the family. Interestingly, the verbs allowing double causatives are not morphosyntactically labile in Mehweb, which is generally poor in labile verbs as compared to sister languages. I conclude that the ability to form double causatives is not a consequence of the morphosyntactic property of being labile; rather, both morphosyntactic properties follow from the same component of the lexical semantics of these verbs and ultimately from the properties of the situational concepts they convey. As a tentative functional explanation I suggest that the relevant property is the weakened status of the agentive participant.

This study aimed at examining morphological processing mechanisms involved in lexical access across the lifespan in the morphologically complex Russian language. We conducted an unprimed lexical decision experiment using number-dominant nouns in participants of a wide age range (n = 190, 9–87 years old), analysing age as a continuous factor. Additionally, we tested whether morphological processing mechanisms are affected by a linguistic factor – the type of plural formation. The results revealed no age-related change in morphological processing mechanisms in Russian: the processing mechanisms were consistent with the dual-route models across the lifespan. This suggests that morphological processing mechanisms are stable across the lifespan even in a morphologically complex language like Russian. Null effects of the type of plural formation provide evidence in favour of a special status of citation forms.

The article studies the prosody of Akkadian prepositions. The placement of prepositions within a written line of cuneiform texts is analyzed. The Old Babylonian data show that with rare exceptions the prepositions of certain type, namely those of (C)V-VC structure, like ana ‘to(wards)’ and ina ‘in’, were never written at the end of a line. This regularity is interpreted as evidence for the proclitic status of these prepositions: as the preposition formed an accentual unit with the following word, the scribes did not want to separate them by placing them on two consecutive lines. This rule was followed in the Old Babylonian texts from South Mesopotamia, but the documents from other regions of the same period treated the corresponding prepositions differently: they either conformed to South Mesopotamian patterns, but with certain exceptions, or they didn’t follow them at all. The writing habits reflected in the documents composed in later dialects, including Middle Babylonian, Middle Assyrian, Western Peripheral Akkadian, Neo-Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian, do not seem to show any regularity in regard to the placement of prepositions: prepositions could occupy any position within a written line.

This study examined the online exchanges of 28 pre-service foreign language teachers (14 in Russia, 14 in the US) as they discussed in English their opinions about cultural products, practices, and perspectives, and their study abroad experiences via voice-based telecollaboration. Informed by intercultural competence frameworks, a qualitative analysis of participants’ oral exchanges revealed six intercultural learning moves performed by participants in order to develop their own and/or others’ intercultural competence during interaction. A follow-up analysis of the intercultural learning moves that emerged in response to five purposefully selected discussion question prompts suggested that one prompt type—i.e. a combined Brainstorm + Reflection Question on Cultural Experiences—encouraged participants to make a higher number and a wider range of high-level intercultural learning moves. The study concluded with guidelines for developing discussion question prompts that are likely to promote the emergence of advanced intercultural learning moves via telecollaboration with global partners.

The current research answers the question how Twitter users express their evaluation of the topical social problem (explicitly or implicitly) and what linguistic means they use being restricted by the limited length of the message. The  article explores how Twitter users socialize with each other and exchange ideas on social issues of great importance, express their feelings using a number of linguistic means while being limited to a fixed number of characters and form solidarity being geographically distant from each other. The research is focused on the linguistic tools employed by Twitter users to express their personal attitudes to migration processes in Europe and the USA. The aim of the current investigation is to determine the correlation between the attitudes of English-speaking users towards migration and the way they are expressed (implicitly or explicitly). The authors attempted to define which tools contributed to implicit or explicit nature of the utterances. The research is based on the content analysis of 100 tweets of English-speaking users collected from February, 1 to July, 31 2017 and done through the program Atlas.ti. The software performs coding of textual units, counting the frequency of codes and their correlation. The choice of the period is defined by significant events in Trump’s migration policy and its consequences. The results of the research show that Twitter users tend to express critical attitudes towards migration rather than approve of it or sympathize with migrants. Criticism is more often expressed implicitly rather than explicitly. In order to disguise the attitude and feelings the English-speaking users of Twitter employed irony, questions and quotations, while imperative structures were used to declare attitudes explicitly. It is also worth mentioning that ellipsis, contractions and abbreviations were used quite frequently which is due to the word limit of tweets. Even though people have an opportunity to send messages anonymously they still tend to imply their negative attitude towards political authorities. At the same time, the lack of knowledge about extralinguistic factors and personal characteristics of users makes the process of interpretation of tweets rather challenging. The findings of the current research suggest the necessity to take into account implicit negative attitudes while carrying out the analysis of public opinion on Twitter.

This paper focuses on semantics and syntax of two attributivizers in Kazym Khanty. Both of the attributivizers have proprietive semantics and attach to a small nominal rather than a full DP. Proprietives are not completely interchangeable, therefore the difference between them is also explored in this paper. Moreover, we are going to show that both attributivizers significantly differ from cases. However, adjectives derived by proprietive markers differ from regular adjectives, as well.

Over the last 30 years Pridnestrovie, a newly independent state in the post-Soviet space, has remained one of the few countries in the world where the Russian language still enjoys its official status and privileged people’s attitudes. This article aims to explain what the origins of this state of affairs are. First, it looks at the history of the region in the 19th century when these territories became Russian, and the community of people from different ethnic backgrounds that Pridnestrovie represents now was initially formed. Then, some changes in terms of territories and language policy, that occurred during the Soviet period, and the impact they had on the contemporary history of the region are considered. After that, the study focuses on several important pieces of the language legislation of Pridnestrovie that secures linguistic pluralism in the country, and further it discusses current language situation in the republic paying special attention to the role of Russian in maintaining the inter-ethnic peace. Finally, the findings revealed in the first part of the study are proved by the results of the questionnaire that asked its participant to express their opinion on the linguistic situation in the republic and tell about their attitudes towards the Russian language and its main function in Pridnestrovie.  

This paper shows that Northern Khanty -en [POSS.2SG] is used in several contexts beyond the proper possessive ones. It behaves quite differently in anaphoric uses and in uses in commands. There are at least three distinct markers with the exponent -en. First, the usual 2SG possessive -en which competes with other possessives and depends in number features on the addressee—if the addressee is plural, the marker is accordingly -ən [POSS.2NSG]. Semantically, it corresponds to Karvovskaya’s (2018) MinSpec operator. Secondly, the salient article -en. It is used with unique objects in commands. It states of a referent of an NP that the referent stands in a SALIENT_TO relation to the addressee. Should the addressee be plural, the exponent is accordingly -ən [POSS.2NSG]. Thirdly, the anaphoric article -en, used with anaphorically accessible unique referents. Semantically it is equivalent to Schwarz’s (2009) strong definite article.

The paper explores the first translations of W. H. Auden into Russian in the context of the cultural projects of the Stalinist USSR in the 1930s. With ideological distinctions across the borders sometimes even more perceptible than linguistic, the translation was bound to be cultural as well as intralingual. The poetry of the “early Auden,” an acknowledged modernist and successor to T. S. Eliot, was enigmatic in densely modernist sense and characterized by acute social awareness at the same time. In translating Auden’s controversial poetic persona, reviewers and editors of periodicals and the editor and translators of the Anthology of New English Poetry chose different strategies: while the former discussed a “revolutionary poet,” the latter attempted to translate the modernist. Juxtaposing these two facets of the Russian Auden, the paper proceeds to analyze the translations of the anthology and to demonstrate how D. S. Mirsky, the compiler and editor of the book mediated Auden’s reception in the USSR.

This paper describes numerals in Rutul (Lezgic, East Caucasian). The data presented here were collected during fieldwork in the village of Kina (Rutul district, Republic of Dagestan, Russia) in 2016 to 2019.

The paper provides a description of nominal inflection in Kina Rutul, a variety of the Rutul language (< Lezgic < Nakh Daghestanian). The description is based on three concepts of paradigmatic classification: class of inflectional equivalence, inflectional type and paradigmatic effect. Class of inflectional equivalence describes main patterns of concatenation between root, case / number exponents and stem formatives. Inflectional type is responsible for the description of more subtle differencies within classes of inflection equivalence (morphological irregularities and / or non-concatenative morphophonology). These differencies are generalized over different inflectional types by means of paradigmatic effect.

This paper presents a description of three classes of lexemes in Kina Rutul (Lezgic, East Caucasian): spatial adverbs, adverbial postpositions and postpositions proper. These classes overlap in majority of East Caucasian languages. I suggest criteria of distinguishing these classes of lexemes from each other. The description includes inflection of the lexemes, their etymology and syntactic properties.

The paper proposes a linguistic approach to studying code-switching IT discourse of Moscovian IT specialists. The topic is of special interest since nowadays code-switching dominates in a number of professional spheres such as informational technologies, marketing and telecommunications. It also becomes a new language for the modern generation and moreover, a necessary tool for establishing contacts and demonstrating community affiliation. This new code exists not only within workplaces but also beyond them, that is why the aim is to provide a thorough linguistic and functional description on this topic. Also, there is an in-depth research into how IT discourse shapes Russian digital language on the whole. The methodology used for research is the Matrix Language Frame Model by C.Myers-Scotton (1993). The language units, which are represented by code-switches, are also analyzed in terms of their syntactic, morphological features and pragmatic functions.

The paper presents the first description of the verb paradigm in Kina Rutul, a single-village variety of the Rutul language (Lezgic, Nakh-Daghestanian) spoken in southern Daghestan. First, I make a distinction between the stative verbs with a reduced paradigm and morphologically canonical verbs with a fuller paradigm. I present the inventory and the paradigm of statives, some of which play a key role in the derivation of periphrastic forms. For canonical verbs, I describe all the synthetic forms derived from the three main stems, namely the perfective stem, the imperfective stem and the infinitive stem (the imperative/optative forms lie outside the scope of the paper). Then I analyse the structure of periphrastic forms, which are composed of a non-finite form and an auxiliary.

The present study sought to test the hypothesis that the production of speech and the comprehension of speech in the left temporal lobe can be anatomically disassociated. Moreover, it is aimed to show that the standard intraoperative object naming task is not sufficient to test all the functionally essential areas in the left temporal lobe. In the introductory part of the article we described the existing information about the left temporal lobe and the awake surgery procedure.  In the course of the study, we collected and analyzed the data from intraoperative brain mapping of 25 patients with brain lesions – gliomas or pharmacoresistant epilepsy, who underwent awake craniotomy. All the patient went through intraoperative language mapping with the use of direct electrical stimulation. In order to map language production and comprehension modalities, in addition to the classical object naming task we used an additional task, the phonological judgment task. The results showed substantial dissociation between mapping of two tasks. According to these findings, we can conclude that the object naming task alone is not suitable for adequate brain mapping of the left temporal cortex. The same dissociation may be regarded as an argument in favor of the anatomical dissociation of the production and comprehension of speech in the left temporal cortex.

This article analyzes some verbal features in the West Russian Chronicles (WRC) (15–16th cc.). The 1st part examines contexts with the construction “быти + participle in -ъш- / -въш-”. This construction is extremely uncommon for Old Russian texts, nevertheless the very possibility of its use is important for understanding the history of the development of the temporal system in Russian. The material of WRC allows us to widen the list of contexts with this construction with two more examples. The 2nd part discusses the functions of pluperfect forms. Rare forms of pluperfect with the linking verb in the aorist form are found in WRC which is quite unexpected for a late text. This article discusses possible explanations for this phenomenon. As for the semantics of the pluperfect forms, all of the basic pluperfect meanings are presented in WRC. The comparison of the contexts with these meanings with the material of the other chronicles allows us to draw a number of conclusions about the history of the pluperfect’s development in Old Russian and its dialects.

Both linguistic (e.g., words, syntax) and extralinguistic (e.g., voice quality) information needs to be considered by interlocutors during linguistic communication. The effects of extralinguistic information on neural sentence processing are particularly poorly understood. Here, we used EEG and passive non-attend design with visual distraction in order to investigate how extralinguistic information affects brain activity during syntactic processing. We collected ERPs while participants listened to Russian pronoun-verb phrases recorded in either male or female voice. We manipulated congruency between the grammatical gender signaled by the verb’s ending and the speaker’s apparent gender. We registered both early and late phrase processing signatures in the incongruent conditions including ELAN (peaking at ~150 ms) and N400. Our data suggest a high degree of automaticity in integrating extralinguistic information during syntactic processing indicating existence of a rapid automatic syntactic integration mechanism sensitive to both linguistic and extralinguistic information.

This study presents a surveyofthe formation of thecollection of Nikolai PetrovichLikhachev (1862-1936), a great collectorand Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, through his life and research interests. This collection was unique for Russia at that time. As a researcher and a collector, Likhachev laid the foundations for the professional study of watermarks and paper studies, medieval diplomatics and sigillography, scholarly art history (in the sphere of icons) in Russia. The Museum of Palaeographycreated by Likhachev included rich material on the history of writing in Europe, Asia, North America and the European colonies of the New World, encompassing a wide chronological period -from the turn of the 4-3 millennia BC to the beginning of the 20th century. His collectionshapedthe schools of the Russian and Soviet Egyptology, Assyriology, Hellenic and Medieval studies, Arabic studies, Byzantine studies, and Slavic studies. The present paper is a contribution to the studies of both his activity as a scholar and an antiquarian,and the shaping of his collection.

The article focuses on cases when the length of the constituent is relevant for Russian syntax and leads to ungrammaticality or partial acceptability of some structures. The list of phenomena under consideration includes ‘one-word restrictions’; differences between complement clauses of matrix verbs in indicative vs. imperative,  include constructions with ‘predicatives’, special properties of nominalizations, structures with short embedded clauses, and so on. I show that the ‘length restrictions’ are in fact of different nature: some are related to discourse factors (deictic / non-deictic semantics, discourse coherence, imperative addressee orientation), while others are related to parsing needs (grammatical units are typically shorter than lexical ones, main clauses are more explicit than embedded ones). Another feature of length restrictions is that they are never holistic / integral: the particular rule usually holds for a particular type of structure, not for the whole domain of syntax (this is what makes our data different from purely syntactic restrictions, such as c-command requirements and island restrictions, which often cover a broad set of constructions and grammatical contexts).

The paper discusses the linguistic architecture of conflicts occuring in present-day social media. It addresses both the sociology of a conflicts as well as the linguistic means used by the two parties to obtain a communicative victory.

In Russian, there are many ways to address a person by name. For instance, a man called Aleksandr may be addressed as Aleksandr, Aleksandr Ivanovič, Saša, Sašen′ka, Saška, Sanja, etc. This study aims at analyzing the use of various strategies of naming the listener throughout the last two centuries. It uses the data from the Russian National Corpus to establish the direction of change in address patterns and combines a statistical approach with a manual inspection of selected examples.

Voice onset time (VOT) is a parameter which distinguishes the way consonants are articulated . This parameter is widely used in acoustic phonetics. In particular, there are many studies of it in the languages of the world. This paper presents an analysis of VOT in the Abaza language (Northwest Caucasian). We measured the VOT of plain consonants and ejectives, extracted annotated values and performed mixed effects regression showing the influence of  the place of articulation and phonation type on VOT values.

Phasal polarity (PhP) is a cross-linguistic category which includes such values as ᴀʟʀᴇᴀᴅʏ, ɴᴏᴛ ʏᴇᴛ, sᴛɪʟʟ and ɴᴏ ʟᴏɴɢᴇʀ. This paper discusses morphologically bound markers of phasal polarity in Abaza, a polysynthetic Northwest Caucasian language. We show that the Abaza PhP affixes ‑χ’a ‘already’, -s (+ negation) ‘not yet’, -rḳʷa ‘still’ and -χ (+ negation) ‘no longer’ are partly incorporated into the TAM system and that for at least some of them it is unclear whether they belong to the domain of phasal polarity or the phasal domain in a narrow sense (i.e. including values ʙᴇɢɪɴ, ᴄᴏɴᴛɪɴᴜᴇ, etc.). We also present some preliminary data concerning the obligatoriness of Abaza PhP markers and their frequencies in texts.