Efficiency is central to understanding the communicative and cognitive underpinnings of language. However, efficiency management is a complex mechanism in which different efficiency effects—such as articulatory, processing and planning ease, mental accessibility, and informativity, online and offline efficiency effects—conspire to yield the coding of linguistic signs. While we do not yet exactly understand the interactional mechanism of these different effects, we argue that universal attractors are an important component of any dynamic theory of efficiency that would be aimed at predicting efficiency effects across languages. Attractors are defined as universal states around which language evolution revolves. Methodologically, we approach efficiency from a cross-linguistic perspective on the basis of a world-wide sample of 383 languages from 53 families, balancing all six macro-areas (Eurasia, North and South America, Australia, Africa, and Oceania). We explore the grammatical domain of verbal person–number subject indexes. We claim that there is an attractor state in this domain to which languages tend to develop and tend not to leave if they happen to comply with the attractor in their earlier stages of evolution. The attractor is characterized by different lengths for each person and number combination, structured along Zipf’s predictions. Moreover, the attractor strongly prefers non-compositional, cumulative coding of person and number. On the basis of these and other properties of the attractor, we conclude that there are two domains in which efficiency pressures are most powerful: strive towards less processing and articulatory effort. The latter, however, is overridden by constant information flow. Strive towards lower lexicon complexity and memory costs are weaker efficiency pressures for this grammatical category due to its order of frequency.

Мороз Г. А. Скорости речи носителей кубанского диалекта кабардино-черкесского языка…-9 -ЛИНГВИСТИКА Мороз Г. А. СКОРОСТИ РЕЧИ НОСИТЕЛЕЙ КУБАНСКОГО ДИАЛЕКТА КАБАРДИНО-ЧЕРКЕССКОГО ЯЗЫКА: УСТНЫЙ ДИСКУРС VS. ЧТЕНИЯ ТЕКСТА 1Данная статья посвящена исследованию скорости речи носителей кубанского диалекта кабар-дино-черкесского языка. В ходе полевого исследования был проведен эксперимент, в котором участвовало девять носителей кубанского диалекта кабардино-черкесского языка. Эксперимент состоял из нескольких частей. В первой части информантам предлагалось рассказать истории по картинкам. Картинки предъявлялись информанту, после ознакомления картинки забирались, а информант должен был пересказать историю другому информанту. Во второй части экспери-мента информантам предлагалось прочитать два текста (прозаический и стихотворный), напи-санных на кубанском диалекте кабардино-черкесского языка. Все этапы записывались на дикто-фон и потом размечались в программах ELAN и Praat. Для выделения единиц речи мы использо-вали критерии выделения элементарных дискурсивных единиц, предложенные в работе (Кибрик, Подлесская, 2014

Voice onset time (VOT) is a parameter which distinguishes the way consonants are articulated . This parameter is widely used in acoustic phonetics. In particular, there are many studies of it in the languages of the world. This paper presents an analysis of VOT in the Abaza language (Northwest Caucasian). We measured the VOT of plain consonants and ejectives, extracted annotated values and performed mixed effects regression showing the influence of the place of articulation and phonation type on VOT values. JEL Classification: Z.