original scinetific paper
Diana Forker, Ova e-mail adresa je zaštićena od spambota. Potrebno je omogućiti JavaScript da je vidite.; Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Summary

The Tsezic languages are a group of five closely related languages that form one subbranch within the Nakh–Daghestanian language family. They can be divided into East Tsezic, comprising Hunzib and Bezhta, and West Tsezic, comprising Khwarshi, Tsez and Hinuq. All Tsezic languages are spoken on the territory of Daghestan, in Southern Russia. The Tsezic languages are morphologically ergative. The most frequent word order is SOV. Tsezic nouns can be marked for number and case. As in other Daghestanian languages, the case formation itself is rather straightforward and regular. The main difficulty in the nominal morphology of the Tsezic languages is the formation of the oblique stem from the base stem. In this paper two main points are made: first, a detailed description of the stem formation mechanisms is given. Second, it is shown that gender affixes are not an important source of oblique and/or plural formatives presented. In the conclusion it is stressed that the Daghestanian languages including the five Tsezic languages treated in this paper have a cross–linguistically unusual system of stem formation that is, however, typical for these Daghestanian languages. Outside the Caucasus only South Dravidian languages seem to have a similar system, but to a much lesser extent. The Tsezic stem formation system is highly complex with its ten patterns of stem formation. It has also shown that there are problems with all proposed diachronic analyses and some proposed synchronic ones. The stem formation of Tsezic system originated in Proto–Daghestanian and Proto–Nakh–Daghestanian, but unfortunately there are no widely accepted reconstructions of it, so the topic deserves further research.

Keywords

word formation; stem formation; Tsezic languages; Didoian lanugages; Dagestanian languages