Introduction

In Harris (2013), I showed how one kind of metathesis in Batsbi originates in derived transitive verbs. Metathesis is a phonological process by which two segments change order, for example XYZ becomes ZYX (where Y may be null). The goal of the present chapter is to show that in the speech of younger speakers the process I previously described has spread to intransitive verbs derived with the intransitivizing suffix -al.

In this chapter, I describe relevant aspects of the structure of verbs in Batsbi and briefly review the origins of metathesis in derived transitive verbs (Sections 2 and 3). I present in Section 4 a variety of morphological types of verbs, showing that metathesis does not occur in these. In Section 5, I present the facts of metathesis in derived intransitives, and in Section 6, I argue that metathesis spread from transitives to intransitives. Section 7 contains a brief conclusion.

Basic verb morphology in Batsbi

Batsbi is a native name for the language that the Georgians call Tsova Tush. It is spoken in a single village and is severely endangered, with the youngest speakers now around sixty, with a handful of exceptions.

For the purposes of this chapter we need morphological information primarily about the verb. Verbs may take a lexically governed gender–number prefix, illustrated in the left-hand column of (1). In the examples, d- is the default gender–number marker and stands in for the others. Not all verbs with gender–number prefixes occur in doublets of the kind in (1), but such examples are effective in showing that these prefixes are lexically governed. (In these examples, -ar forms the masdar, a declinable deverbal noun.)

Gender–number affixes are glossed as “CM,” as they are traditionally known in the Caucasus as class markers. These markers indicate the gender and number of the subject of an intransitive (in the absolutive or ergative case, see below) or the direct object of a transitive.

Georgian is a language of the Kartvelian (South Caucasian) language family; this family appears to be unrelated to North East Caucasian and North West Caucasian language families. Georgian is spoken by some five million speakers in the Republic of Georgia, formerly part of the USSR, but now independent.

The notion ‘word’ (Georgian sit'q'va) is very much recognised in Georgian culture. The society is deeply literary, with the Georgian alphabet having been invented in the fourth or fifth century AD, and with texts dating from that time. Georgians have strong intuitions about what is a word, and this corresponds to orthographic practice, with few exceptions.

Summary of the typology

Like other languages of the Caucasus, Georgian has a large number of consonants (twenty-eight) and a modest number of vowels (five). Georgian is famous for its consonant clusters, which may contain up to seven consonants, e.g. mc'vrtneli ‘trainer’, vprckvni ‘I peel it’; clusters are not punctuated by epenthetic vowels. Traditional work in Georgian has identified so-called harmonic consonant clusters, which are characterised by (a) shared laryngeal properties (roughly, all voiceless, all voiced or all ejectives), (b) a structure in which each successive consonant is articulated further back in the mouth (e.g. pt, pk, tk are harmonic clusters, but kp and tp, while allowed, are not harmonic) and (c) a first segment that is a stop or affricate and a second that is a stop, affricate or fricative; see Vogt (1958) and Mač'avariani (1965).

Introduction

As set out in chapter 3, syntactic borrowing is one of the fundamental mechanisms in the approach to syntactic change developed in this book. In this chapter, we evaluate universals (and general claims) that have been proposed in the linguistic literature concerning borrowing, we illustrate various aspects of syntactic borrowing and other changes induced by language contact, and we show how these fit in to our approach in general.

Syntactic borrowing is perhaps the most neglected and abused area of syntactic change. Excesses in the past are well known and require little comment here; more disturbing is that such problems persist even to the present day. Current views range from the extremes on the one hand, that syntactic borrowing is either impossible or is very rare, to on the other hand fanciful explanations that all otherwise unexplained syntactic eccentricities in a language may be due to foreign influence. This notwithstanding, grammatical borrowing was generally regarded as respectable and important in the history of linguistics (see chapter 2). In this chapter it is our hope to put syntactic borrowing in balanced perspective and to determine the role it must be allotted in any theory of syntactic change. We approach this task in the following way.

Introduction

In the last two decades word order has perhaps received more attention than any other issue in diachronic syntax. Most of this work has looked at word order change from the point of view of word order universals, first discovered by Greenberg (1963) and further studied by many others since then. Diachronic studies inspired by Greenbergian universals have been widely criticized on grounds of methodology and are not widely accepted. We have tried to take a fresh approach to these issues. After a general introduction in the present section to the questions involved, we begin by examining the basis for the widespread assumption that the order of morphemes in a word and the order of words in a compound reflect, in some sense, the order of words in a clause (section 8.2). We show that while this is often true of bound morphemes, it is not always; in compounds there seems to be little basis at all for such an assumption. In section 8.3 we look at the types of word order change that result from reanalysis and show that through reanalysis it is possible for an order to be introduced that is disharmonic with the rest of the language. This offers a solution to the long-standing problem of how, if word order harmony is a preferred state, a language could begin to change from one harmony to another.

Introduction

Our goal in this chapter is the presentation of universal characterizations of some of the diachronic processes that turn biclausal constructions into monoclausal ones. We approach this goal first by describing one such process from the point of view of several languages, then generalizing about the form of this process. We then examine a different process, and make generalizations about its form. Finally we analyze a large category of processes and end the chapter with a statement of general principles governing all the changes examined within the chapter.

To this end, section 7.2 discusses processes that derive from cleft clauses containing pragmatic markers. In section 7.3 we describe the transition from quotation constructions to structures involving a quotative marker. A process that derives a variety of periphrastic expressions of verbal categories is discussed in section 7.4. All three processes considered here are types of reanalysis; in section 7.5 we state general principles governing changes of biclausal to monoclausal structures.

Highlighting constructions

We examine in this section cross-linguistic evidence concerning one origin of highlighting – the use of particles to mark focus or topic. This is not an exhaustive inventory of sources of such markers; instead we deal in some detail with a single common pathway of development, derivations found in a wide variety of unrelated languages.

Introduction

Extension is one of the three basic mechanisms of change in our approach. We defined extension in chapter 3 as change in the surface manifestation of a syntactic pattern that does not involve immediate or intrinsic modification of underlying structure. Many aspects of extension are discussed in chapter 4, especially in section 4.4. This chapter is devoted to a more detailed description and presentation of examples. The central purpose of the chapter is to state a constraint on extension.

It has often been said that diachronic change simplifies the grammar; yet it has often been pointed out that if that were always so, grammars would become noticeably simpler in the course of time. In the realm of syntax, it is clear that reanalysis often can introduce complexity to the grammar (though it can also result in simplification, as well), while extension can eliminate exceptions and irregularities by bringing the new analysis into line with the rest of the existing grammar. The constraint on extensions, formulated below as (39), makes concrete the observation that extension always plays this role.

Extension is a mechanism that operates to change the syntax of a language by generalizing a rule, and in section 5.2 we give two examples of this. The constraint which we discuss in greater detail in section 5.3 below states minimum observed limits on the application of extension in general. There are still stronger constraints, which seem to operate on individual aspects of grammar, and these are discussed in chapters 7–9.