Zaira Khalilova

Ditransitive constructions in East Caucasian: A family overview

After giving a general account of ditransitive constructions in East Caucasian languages, the paper focuses on the most salient and unique property of ‘give’-verbs in the languages of the family – the distinction made between two types of transfer. This distinction reflects the double nature of ‘give’-situations which involve both metaphorical transfer of possession rights and physical transfer of the object, and the consequent double nature of the Recipient which combines properties of a Beneficiary and a Goal. East Caucasian languages break Recipient down into two different marking strategies which may be called dative and lative, respectively. After giving a brief introduction to genetic grouping and areal spread of the family, as well as sketches its typological profile, we provide a general characteristic of the ditransitive constructions. Then we discuss some specific properties of dative marking in East Caucasian, focussing on the alternation in Recipient/Goal marking in ‘give’-situations, non-dative marking of the Addressee with speech verbs, and dative with verbs of contact. Finally, § 8 is a summary of the discussion. 1 This research has been supported by MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology during my stay in Leipzig in 2007. Projects of creating Archi and Khinalug corpora that provided important data for this article were supported by the National Science Foundation, USA (0553546) and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (08-06-00345). 2 We would like to express our gratitude to all people who contributed to this paper with their notes, remarks, comments and data: Arsen Abdullaev, Gilles Authier, Marina Chumakina, Bernard Comrie, Denis Creissels, Diana Forker, Dmitri Ganenkov, Adigozel Haciyev, Martin Haspelmath, Mažid Khalilov, Seppo Kittila, Magomed Magomedov, Timur Maisak, Andrej Malchukov, Solmaz Merdanova, Bulbul Musaeva, Rasul Mutalov, Vladimir Plungian, Sergej Saj, Bela Savkhelishvili, Don Stilo, Nina Sumbatova.