The expression of ‘inferentiality’ in Abkhaz

Abstract

In Comrie (1976: 108) we read: ‘Several languages have special inferential verb forms, to indicate that the speaker is reporting some event that he has not himself witnessed, but about whose occurrence he has learnt at second hand (though without, incidentally, necessarily casting doubt on the reliability of the information)’. Two pages later Comrie writes follows:Serebrennikov (1960: 66) lists the following languages known to him where there is a close formal relation, down to identity, between the expression of perfect and inferential meaning: Turkic languages: the Uralic languages Nenets (Yurak-Samoyed), Finnish, Estonian, Man (Cheremis), Komi (Zyryan), Udmurt (Votyak), Mańśi (Vogul); Georgian; and the Indo-European languages Latvian, Bulgarian, and Albanian.

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

“…Few languages have systems in which both number and gender features participate in agreement but remain completely independent of each other, and it is hard to find a language that reliably this description; at the writing of this paper, candidate languages include Abkhaz (Hewitt 1979), Amharic (Kramer 2015: 44), Yimas (Foley 1991), and Romanian, at least according to some researchers (Giurgea 2008;Croitor & Giurgea 2009). …”

Explaining vowel systems: dispersion theory vs natural selection

“…(Hale 1997) Phonologists since at least Jakobson and Trubetzkoy (e.g., Trubetzkoy 1939) have been concerned with why languages display their particular array of sound patterns. The central questions raised in treatments of the distribution of vowel systems in particular are (i) why vowels fall into the particular zones of the perceptual/ articulatory space that they do, (ii) why some sounds are more common in vowel inventories, and (iii) why 'unnatural' vowel systems exist, such as the vertical ones of the sort we find in Abkhaz (Hewitt 1979) and Marshallese (Choi 1992).…”

Subject/object processing asymmetries in Korean relative clauses: Evidence from ERP data

“… 7 Among numerous SOV languages, only Abkhaz (Hewitt 1979) seems to be a language without such overt case marking. On the other hand, a large proportion of SVO languages exhibit no case marking (Mallinson & Blake 1981:101).…”