Обособленный топик в абхазо-адыгских языках

Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. Язык и литература. 2024. Т. 21. № 3. С. 701–719.

Lander Y., Bagirokova I., Унарокова Ш. Ш.

This paper considers dislocated topics in living West Caucasian (Abkhaz-Adyghe) languages, i.e. in West Circassian and Kabardian, Abkhaz and Abaza. We show that there are at least two grammaticalized constructions that introduce topics without integrating them into the subsequent clause. The first construction containing simple dislocated topics either leaves them unmarked or (in West Circassian and Kabardian) marks them with the absolutive case. The second construction marks the dislocated topic or a combination of the topic with a copula with a conditional marker. Though both patterns can be described as left dislocation, they turn out to have different distribution. In particular, only the construction marking the topic with a conditional suffix allows indefinite and quantified topics (which are in general unexpected in such constructions). In addition, we discuss specific constructions where the topic expression introduces the situation under discussion. The data include both examples retrieved from corpora (for West Circassian, Kabardian and Abaza) and examples obtained through elicitation.

Keywords: адыгейский язык, кавказские языки, абхазо-адыгские языки, кабардино-черкесский язык, информационная структура, языки Кавказа, абазинский язык, абхазский язык

Publication based on the results of: Computational methods in linguistic convergence study (2024)