Thesis defence (Linguistics): Filip Larsson: Nominal and verbal affixation in the Caucasus

Filip Larsson will defend his PhD thesis in General Linguistics Nominal and verbal affixation in the Caucasus.

Abstract:

This thesis aims to investigate the interaction between complex morphology and complex phonology in the languages of the Caucasus. The Caucasus is well-known for containing languages with exceptionally large case systems and complex polysynthetic verbal morphology, which is paired with some of the largest consonant inventories in the world outside Africa. The study focuses specifically on nominal and verbal affixation, the morphological process of adding bound morphemes to lexical stems, as the languages of the Caucasus present some of the most intricate affixation patterns in the world.
 

The underlying hypothesis of the thesis is that larger consonant inventories enable more complex morphology, which was operationalised as the number of grammatical functions expressed by affixation. A data set of more than 11,000 affixes was compiled, which enabled a comparison of the vast variety of grammatical functions expressed by affixation and the related phonological forms in 56 languages from the five language families of the Caucasus, i.e. Kartvelian, Nakh-Dagestanian, Northwest Caucasian, Indo-European and Turkic. The results indicated a significant positive correlation between the number of grammatical functions expressed by affixation and the size of a language’s consonant phoneme inventory, which was also true for the combined inventories of both consonant and vowel phonemes. It has previously been proposed that the three endemic language families of the Caucasus, i.e. Kartvelian, Nakh-Dagestanian and Northwest Caucasian, belong to a common linguistic area, known as the Caucasian Sprachbund.

The thesis also intended to test whether the nominal and verbal affixation inventories could support the notion of a morphological Caucasian Sprachbund, and the results could not support such a morphological sprachbund. A second hypothesis postulated that there are systematic phonological differences between affixes and lexical stems, which motivated a second data set of more than 21,500 lexical items from 52 of the 56 languages of the affixal data set. When the affixal data set and the lexical data set were compared, a significant difference could be observed between phonological distributions of combinations of place and manner of articulation. The results also demonstrated that voiceless consonants are significantly more common in lexical stems than in affixes. The phonological results also indicated that there are significant differences for certain combinations of place, manner and voicing, where particularly the various ejective consonants of the Caucasus all presented significantly different distributions in the affixal and lexical data sets. This suggests that the large inventories of ejectives in the Caucasus potentially facilitate the distinction between affixes and lexical stems in these languages.