Details: Category: Linguistics

Towards a comparative syntax of the Kartvelian languages, in Dag Haug & Eirik Welo (eds.) Haptachahapta:itish — Festschrift for Fridrik Thordarson, Novus Forlag. The Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture. Oslo, 2005, 119-138.

When a classicist moves outside his field, it is a comfort to find unrelated languages behaving in a way with which he is familiar. At the same time, it is exciting to be faced with the challenge resulting from encounters with different structures. When the
move takes the scholar to the Caucasus, the differences often seem to outweigh the similarities. Both the dedicatee of this volume and the author of this contribution have made this journey, and so it seemed appropriate to make available in a work designed for both Indo-Europeanists and caucasologists some unpublished materials gathered some years ago which present both types of data. This offering could be viewed as a modest expansion of, or supplement to, the wealth of information in Nia Abesadze's 1960 and 1963 papers on subordination in the Kartvelian languages (especially Svan), though her main concerns there were the subordinating elements themselves rather than the overall nature of the hypotactic constructions.

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