enaTmecnierebis sakiTxebi ISSUES OF LINGUISTICS - Tbilisi State ...

The fourth group, exemplified by γaγadebs, γaγadq’o "he cries, he made a
cry", is not fully and truly unergative in the aorist in Old Georgian. A complete
analysis can be found in Harris (1985), but briefly, in Old Georgian the aorist form
is transitive with an incorporated direct object. Because the changes described in
this paper had not yet taken place, we really can say of the Series I form only that it
was intransitive. Like the first and third morphological types described here, this
type developed the prefix i- in Series II forms and not in Series I forms.
Several prefixes of the form i- occur in this position in the Georgian verb,
but the most likely source of the i- shown in Table 4 is the i- that forms a
productive group of unaccusatives, often called mediopassives. However, in the
mediopassives, if i- occurs, it occurs in all paradigms, not just in those of Series II.
3. Conclusions
In Georgian the unaccusative is more clearly distinguished morphologically
from the other two classes than they are from each other.
Attested changes in Georgian show that morphological classification in the
verb does not always arise through grammaticalization and does not always
resemble the process described for the development of gender. Georgian seems to
pull together disparate pre-existing morphological resources to set apart the three
classes considered here.
References
Alexiadou, Artemis, Elena Anagnostopoulou and Martin Everaert, eds. 2004. The Unaccusativity
Puzzle. Oxford: OUP.
Aronoff, Mark. 1994. Morphology by itself: Stems and inflectional classes. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Burzio, Luigi. 1986. Italian syntax: A government-binding approach. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Corbett, Greville G. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harris, Alice C. 1981. Georgian syntax: A study in relational grammar. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Harris, Alice C.. 1982. Georgian and the Unaccusative Hypothesis, Language 58: 290-306.
Harris, Alice C. 1985. Diachronic syntax: the Kartvelian case. (Syntax and Semantics,
18.) New York: Academic Press.
Imnaišvili, I. 1971. Kartuli enis ist’oriuli krest’omatia, t’. 1, nac’ili II. [Historical chrestomathy
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Tbilisi: Universit’et’i.
Levin, Beth and Malka Rappaport Hovav. 1995. Unaccusativity: At the syntax-lexical
semantics interface. (Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 26.) Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Perlmutter, David M. 1978. Impersonal passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis. BLS
4.157-89.
Wurzel, Wolfgang Ullrich. 1992. Die wiederholte Klassifikation von Substantiven: Zur
Entstehung von Deklinationsklassen. Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und
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