Marine Ivanishvili,
Georgian Academy of Sciences, Tbilisi,
Georgia
Morphosyntactic peculiarities of the Kartvelian languages are
quite well-studied but some problems are still under
consideration: From the typological point of view Word Order
is one of the important issues. Theoretically there are
following possibilities: SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OVS, OSV. Due to
the typological data some of them are widespread: SVO, SOV,
VSO and some of them are rare: VOS,OSV,OVS.
In the Kartvelian languages the structure of the simple
syntactic constructions are based on the verb valency and case
differences. There are three main models of case patterns:
I. {S in Nominative (marker -i/0),
[Odir in Dative (marker -s)], [Oind in Dative (marker -s)]};
e.g.:
|
Georgian: |
k’ac-i
(S+Nom) ashenebs saxl-s (Odir+Dat)
(‘A man builds a house’) |
| Megrelian: |
k’och-i
(S+Nom) ogans qh’ude-s(Odir+Dat)
(‘A man builds a house’) |
|
Svan: |
ma:re
(S.Nom) agen kor-s (Odir+Dat)
(‘A
man builds a house’) |
II. {S in Ergative
(marker -ma/m), [Odir in Nominative (marker -i/0)],
[Oind in Dative (marker -s)]}; e.g.:
| Georgian: |
k’ac-ma (S+Erg) aashena saxl-i
(Odir+Nom) (‘A man built a house’) |
| Megrelian:
|
k’och-k(i) (S+Erg) kodaagu qh’ude
(Odir.Nom) (‘A man built a house) |
| Svan: |
ma:re-m (S+Erg) adge kor
(Odir.Nom)
(‘A
man built a house’) |
III. {S in Dative
(marker -s), [Odir in Nominative (marker -i/0)],
[Oind in PP (postposition -tvis)]}; e.g.:
| Georgian:
|
k’ac-s (S+Dat) aushenebia saxl-i
(Odir+Nom) (‘A man has built a house’)
|
| Megrelian:
|
k’o-s (S+Dat)
kudugapu(n) qh’ud (Odir.Nom)
(‘A man has built a house’)
|
| Svan: |
ma:ra-s (S+Dat) xogema kor
(Odir.Nom)
(‘A man has
built a house’) |
The three models are
basic for the generation of any kind of simple sentences that
can be derived by the adding of some attributes and adjuncts.
Because of the developed case patterns the word order in the
Kartvelian languages is mostly free: Major constituents may
occur in any position; however, it is possible to distinguish
statistically unmarked word order: SOV. Any deviation from
this order is resulted from the changes in the information
structure of a sentence: various Topic and Focus combinations
can be expressed by the reordering. The paper deals with the
phonetic, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic peculiarities of
various models of reordering and suggests some generalizations
describing the process of information packaging.
|
