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Ergativity in the Adyghe system of valency-changing derivations
In this paper I will analyse the syntactic properties of valency-changing derivations and other syntactic processes in Adyghe (a language of the West Caucasian family spoken in the Republic of Adygheya and the Krasnodar region of Russia, and also in some countries of western Asia such as Turkey). My aim is to determine whether these processes testify to syntactic ergativity or accusativity in Adyghe, or whether they in fact shed no light at all on the question of Adyghe alignment behaviour.
In the present paper, I base my analysis of syntactic ergativity on the evidence of valency-changing derivation only. I choose not to consider other pivot properties related to ergativity / accusativity (coordination reduction, relativization, subordinate clauses etc.; see Dixon 1994; Van Valin and LaPolla 1997). It seems to me more justifiable to restrict myself to the data presented by derivational behaviour alone, since in a single article it is impossible to analyse the whole range of data related to ergativity in a polysynthetic language like Adyghe; moreover, the valency-changing derivational system may be organized ergatively, for example, while other syntactic processes are organized accusatively, or vice versa.
The processes analysed in this paper can be divided into two groups, based on the kind of information they provide about ergativity in Adyghe.
First of all, there are derivations which can be regarded as semantically motivated (though syntactic motivation can also be proposed for these processes).
Secondly, there are derivations which are only compatible with transitive verbs, namely the inadvertitive and potential. These transformations are more significant for our analysis, since they show that Adyghe is syntactically ergative.
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