Decreasing valency-changing operations in a valency-increasing language?

P. 285–304.

Lander Yu., Letuchiy A.

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.

Keywords: Adyghe, valency change, адыгейский язык, актантная деривация, грамматическая типология, кавказские языки, Northwest Caucasian languages, абхазо-адыгские языки, languages of the Caucasus, языки Кавказа, Caucasian languages, North Caucasian languages, Circassian languages, grammatical typology, valency changing derivation, актантные деривации

Publication based on the results of: Функционирование морфологии в полисинтетическом языке (2014)

In book

Valency changes. Theoretical and typological perspectives

Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017.