This article deals with the order of verbal suffixes in Adyghe, a polysynthetic language of the Caucasus. Traditionally the structure of the Adyghe word form and the order of its affixes were described in terms of template morphology. However, we present new data demanding another, substantially different approach. We demonstrate that for the most part suffix ordering within the Adyghe verb follows strictly compositional rules. This feature is a manifestation of the polysynthetic nature of the language.

The paper describes the form and behavior of placeholders in Udi and Agul, two languages belonging to the Lezgic branch of the Northeast Caucasian family. The placeholders found in these languages show clear similarity despite the fact that they developed independently. In both languages, nominal placeholders originate from interrogative pronouns, which in combination with the verb 'do' serve as a source for verbal placeholders. In Udi, placeholders further gave rise to a similative construction describing a set of individuals or events on the basis of their similarity to a specific referent or situation. Finally, we suggest hypotheses concerning the development of placeholders and the correlations between their form and the overall typological profile of a language. 1 This paper is based on our talk given at the Conference on the Languages of the Caucasus in 2007 (Leipzig, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology). We are grateful to the audience of the conference as well as to Nino Amiridze, Boyd Davis, Margaret Maclagan, and Vera Podlesskaya for discussions. All errors are ours. This material is based upon work supported in part by the RGNF grant No. 09-04-00332a. 2 Our Udi corpus was recorded in 2004-2006 in the village of Nizh, Azerbaijan, and represents the Nizh dialect of Udi; a sample of Udi spontaneous speech was published in Ganenkov et al. (2008). The Agul corpus used here was recorded in 2004-2005 by Dmitry Ganenkov, Timur Maisak and Solmaz Merdanova in the village of Huppuq', Daghestan, and represents the Huppuq' dialect of Agul.

The current chapter elaborates on an approach which aims at the cross-linguistic comparison of lexical domains or (sub)systems. This approach is based on distinguishing among semantic domains which can be said to occur across languages and which are useful and relevant from a typological perspective. We illustrate this approach by exploring the conceptualization of motion / being in liquid medium (aquamotion), within which four general domains (swimming, sailing, drifting, and floating) are recognized. Using this distinction, we propose a typology of aquamotion systems that distinguishes between ‘rich’, ‘poor’, and ‘middle’ systems of aquamotion expressions depending on the lexical contrasts that the language displays.

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