Alice C. Harris

Where in the Word Is the Udi Clitic

This article shows that endoclitics do exist in Udi, a language of the North East Caucasian family, and this fact poses a challenge to the lexicalist hypothesis. Clitics may be positioned between the morphemes of complex verb stems and immediately before the final segments of monomorphemic verb stems. The author argues, on the basis of accepted tests for wordhood, that complex verb stems are single words, not phrases. On the basis of criteria developed by Zwicky and Pullum (1983), it is argued that the clitics of Udi are true clitics. An analysis of the placement of clitics in various positions inside verb stems is proposed in optimality theory. The author shows that phonological phenomena do not provide an alternative basis for positioning these clitics and concludes that clitics in Udi are a counterexample to the lexical integrity hypothesis.

Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics and its critical role in theory development: early beginnings and recent advances

Recent years have seen a small but growing body of psycholinguistic research focused on typologically diverse languages. This represents an important development for the field, where theorising is still largely guided by the often implicit assumption of universality. This paper introduces a special issue of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience devoted to the topic of cross-linguistic and field-based approaches to the study of psycholinguistics. The papers in this issue draw on data from a variety of genetically and areally divergent languages, to address questions in the production and comprehension of phonology, morphology, words, and sentences. To contextualise these studies, we provide an overview of the field of cross-linguistic psycholinguistics, from its early beginnings to the present day, highlighting instances where cross-linguistic data have significantly contributed to psycholinguistic theorising.

Preverbs and their origins in Georgian and Udi

The structure of the preverb + stem combination is superficially similar in Georgian, a member of the Kartvelian (South Caucasian) family, and in unrelated Udi, a member of the Lezgian group of the North East Caucasian family. Compare (1) and (2) in this regard. (1) Georgian: mi-v-i-t’an-e thither-1sg-cv-carry-aor ‘I took it (away)’2 (2) Udi: ta-zu-s-er-e thither-1sg-carry-er-aorII ‘I took it (away)’ Of interest here is the fact that in both languages the preverb (mi-, ta-) forms a semantic whole with the verb root (-t’an-,-s-), yet an agreement marker (v-, -ne-) occurs between them. This kind of interruption of a semantic and formal unit is a well recognized problem in linguistics (see, for example, Ackerman and Webelhuth 1998). In this paper it is shown that two quite different histories led to the situation found today and illustrated in (1–2).

Diachronic Morphological Typology

A diachronic approach can explain key areas of morphological typology. Recent work has shed light on the origins of morphemes of different kinds, including prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes. Work with databases has generally confirmed the existence of a preference for suffixes over other kinds of morphemes, and a diachronic approach, in conjunction with processing, explains how this comes about. Research on a variety of languages suggests to many, the importance of fusional, agglutinative, and isolating types.

Active/Inactive Marking

Active/inactive marking is a type parallel to nominative/accusative, ergative/absolutive, or tripartite marking. In an active/inactive marking system, one marker (usually case or agreement) is conditioned by subjects of transitives and of certain intransitives, while a different marker is conditioned by direct objects and by subjects of remaining intransitives. A few languages permit variable marking for a subset of intransitive verbs. Various theories to account for this distribution are based on semantics and syntax, on semantics alone, or on syntax alone. Some scholars suggest that different semantic contrasts may underlie different active/inactive systems.