Expressivity in Georgian and other Caucasian Languages

Thomas Wier

The Slurring Terms Across Languages (STAL) network (https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/home) invites you to a talk by Thomas Wier (Free University of Tbilisi) entitled "Expressivity in Georgian and other Caucasian Languages". The talk will take place online on FEBRUARY 10, 14:30-16:00 Central European Time (CET), and is part of the of STAL Seminar series (https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/seminar). If you want to participate, please write to [email protected] for the Zoom link. Below you can find the abstract.

All welcome!

ABSTRACT:

Expressive and ideophonic constructions conveying ‘marked words that depict sensory imagery’ (Dingemanse 2012) are frequently found in the languages of all regions of the world, but their distribution, use and functioning across languages of the Caucasus has never been documented from a regional perspective. This talk will give you a brief taste of the various kinds of expressive language present in the three autochthonous Caucasian families: Abkhaz-Adyghean, Kartvelian and Nakh-Daghestanian. It will also look at greater length at the specific morphological and syntactic peculiarities of expressives in Georgian, which exhibit exuberant consonant clusters, processes of reduplication uncharacteristic of the language as a whole, as well as specific morphosyntactic alignment splits between different classes of expressive.