Kevin Tuite

The production of gesture

Speech, the utterance of linguistic forms, is but one component of a multichannel complex of physical activities which, in one way or another, signify. In this paper I will discuss one particular component of this complex which reflects an especially close correspondence to the verbal channel: gesticulation, or gesture, the often depictive hand movements which accompany speech. The article is divided into three parts. The first section will be given over to a discussion of the various classes of nonverbal activity which researchers have recognized; in the second part I will briefly discuss the semiotics of gesture; and in the third part I will propose a model of gesture production.

The myth of the Caucasian Sprachbund: The case of ergativity

It is a commonplace to refer to the Caucasus as a linguistic area or ‘Sprachbund’, that is, as a region where languages of diverse genetic backgrounds share grammatical features. But whereas lists of area1 features can be readily drawn up for the Balkans, Amazonia, etc., attempts to do the same for the Caucasus come up short. Catford (1978) can only find three features shared by all indigenous languages of the Caucasus: (1) uvular consonants; (2) glottalized obstruents; (3) ergativity. Of these, only the second appears to be a genuinely area1 feature, being shared with Indo-European and Turkic languages of the Caucasus. Uvular consonants are too frequent in Eurasia to he a meaningful criterion. As for ergativity, I will demonstrate that the only common features shared by the morphosyntactic systems of the Abxaz-Adyghean, Nax-Daghestanian and Kartvelian families are reflections of typological universals characterizing the expression of ergativity in all languages (Dixon, Silverstein, Blake, Bossong, etc.) In all other respects, the systems are radically different: AbxazAdyghean is head-marking and prefixal; Nax-Daghestanian is dependent-marking, and agreement with absolutives refers to gender rather than person; Kartvelian has a complicated double-marking split system sensitive to aspect, noun-phrase type, and lexical verb class. If, as I argue, the entire Caucasus does not form a Sprachbund, there is evidence that it comprises several smaller-scale linguistic areas, some of them quite ancient. 0 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Agentless Transitive Verbs in Georgian

The Georgian language has an unusual abundance of indirect (dative-subject) verbs. Most of these are intransitive, but several dozen are formally transitive. The focus of this article is on the subset of Georgian indirect transitives that lack overt grammatical subjects (e.g., ‘I shiver’, lit., ‘it makes me shiver’). The semantic, morphological, and syntactic features of Georgian agentless transitives are presented and compared to those of similar verb types from other languages. Of particular interest is a small group of bodily emanation verbs, such as ‘yawn’ and ‘belch’, that are paired with syntactically inverse direct-transitive verb forms. A scenario is reconstructed for the origin of such direct-indirect pairings, which are otherwise unknown in Georgian.

The Literature of Georgia: A History

This study reveals the literature of Georgia to be unique among that of the former Soviet Union in its combination of quality and length of literary tradition. It charts the development of Georgian literature from the largely religious texts of the 5th century, through its golden medieval age, to the diversities of the 20th century. Special mention is made of the poets Vazha Pshavela, Galaktion Tabidze and Paolo Iashvili, as well as the novelists Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, Grigol Robakidze and Mikheil Javakhishviei.