The South Caucasian languages

As part of a special issue of Lingua intended to provide up-to-date basic information on the Caucasian languages to general linguists in light of recent advances in syntactic analysis, international cooperation, & accessibility to fieldwork, a descriptive analysis of the phonology, inflectional & derivational morphology, & syntax of the South Caucasian languages presents comparative data from Old & Modern Georgian, Mingrelian, Laz, & Svan. Particular attention is given to clause structure, case alignment & agreement phenomena, & the verb system; in addition to an account of all 16 morpheme positions in the Modern Georgian verb, evidential inflection in Mingrelian is described to illustrate one of the few features of South Caucasian verb inflection not present in the standard form of Modern Georgian. Categories traditionally characterized as screeves, verb series, & version are clarified with respect to sets of grammatical functions they express, particularly aspect & valency. 9 Tables, 1 Appendix, 251 References. J. Hitchcock