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Каузативные оппозиции в христианском урмийском новоарамейском
The article is devoted to causative verb alternation in Christian Urmi Neo-Aramaic. I have analyzed the formal types of 31 causal/noncausal verb pairs developed by M. Haspelmath (1993). Field data were collected during the fieldtrip to the village of Urmiya, Krasnodar Krai, Russia. I show that Haspelmath’s ordering of verb meanings according to the likelihood of spontaneous occurrence is valid for Urmi Neo-Aramaic. Events that are most likely to arise spontaneously, such as ‘boil’ or ‘dry’, are encoded by non-derived verbs in Christian Urmi, and their causative counterparts (‘boil’, ‘dry’) are morphologically marked. Labile verbs are used in Christian Urmi to denote situations that usually require an external agent, such as ‘break’ or ‘split’. The latter have replaced the anticausative encoding, which was preserved in Classical Syriac. Both Urmi Neo-Aramaic and Classical Syriac show predominance of the causative type of marking, so this type is diachronically stable. Urmi labile verbs can be divided into two groups: some were already labile in Syriac while the lability of others is an innovative Neo-Aramaic feature.