Schedule 75. StuTS

This talk will be concerned with the strategies the Georgian language uses to mark the relationships between the arguments of its verbs as well as how those strategies are reconstructed for the Proto-language and how they developed over time into the system that is historically attested and has remained nearly the same since Old Georgian times.

Georgian, as a Caucasian language, is often mentioned to be an ergative-absolutive language. A second look, however, reveals a far more complex picture.

Georgian presents a fascinating and intriguing array of different morphosyntactical alignment patterns, in order to mark the various relationships between the arguments of its verbs. These argument marking patterns do not exist by chance, but are the result of a long process of evolution, with which this talk will be concerned.

It will deal with the main evidence that has been adduced for the reconstruction of its Proto-language’s (Proto-Kartvelian) argument marking patterns and detail their evolution, which surprisingly (at least to me) not only gives more insight into argument marking itself, but other grammatical categories of language, too such as tense, aspect and mood (TAM) and how they may be affected by changes in the patterns of marking arguments.

Info

Day: 2024-05-10
Start time: 15:20
Duration: 00:30
Room: Seashell (33.4.032)
Track: Historical Linguistics
Language: en

Links:

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