Aspects of Abaza Verbal Suffixation

This bachelor’s thesis is devoted to verbal suffixation in Abaza, a polysynthetic language belonging to the Northwest Caucasian family. On the basis of fieldwork data collected in 2017–2019, I offer a typologically informed description of suffixes located in the Abaza verb between the root and the markers of tense, and discuss several theoretical issues concerning semantics of the suffixes and their ordering. The first chapter of the study comprises individual grammatical descriptions of each suffix including observations on their semantics and polysemy, compatibility with tenses, peculiarities of their morphological behavior, etc. In the second chapter, I analyze the interaction of suffixes with the event structure of verbs. In the framework of Ramchand’s “first phase syntax”, I show that the interpretations of the ‘again’-marker -χ and the assertive-intensive marker -ʒa are determined by the presence of the resultant state component in the event structure of the verb and the suffixes’ being able to take in their scope either individual components of the event structure or the event structure as a whole. I also offer a schematic representation of these semantic facts in terms of the suffixes’ attachment to different projections in the first phase syntax and hypothesize about possible positions of the other suffixes with respect to event structure. In the third chapter, I discuss restrictions on possible combinations of suffixes and their mutual order. On the basis of the previous analysis of the suffixes’ semantics, I show that their order in the verb form does not always result from their scopal relations. The apparently semantically compatible suffixes often appear to be in a complementary distribution, and even if their combination is permitted, their order is often free. This allows me to formulate the following conclusion about the internal organization of the Abaza verb form: for the affixes whose meanings strongly interact with the event structure, their position in the verb form tends to be fixed, whereas for the affixes with a looser connection with the event structure, their position is rather determined by the general principles of syntax and compositionality.