Abstract
After presenting some basic genetic, historical and typological information about Adyghe this chapter outlines the quantification patterns it expresses. It illustrates various semantic types of quantifiers, such as generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, definite and partitive which are defined in the Quantifier Questionnaire in Chapter 1. It partitions the expression of the semantic types into morpho-syntactic classes: Adverbial type quantifiers and Nominal (or Determiner) type quantifiers. For the various semantic and morpho-syntactic types of quantifiers it also distinguishes syntactically simple and syntactically complex quantifiers, as well as issues of distributivity and scope interaction, classifiers and measure expressions, and existential constructions. The chapter describes structural properties of determiners and quantified noun phrases in Adyghe, both in terms of internal structure (morphological or syntactic) and distribution.
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Notes
- 1.
To simplify the glosses, I will gloss overt case markers as abs and obl without specifying their definiteness. Null morphemes, such as sg and case markers of indefinite DPs, won’t be glossed at all. The same will be accepted for various null affixes in the verbal paradigm, such as the null Absolutive agreement prefix (1–2), the present tense suffix, etc. Moreover, I will employ abbreviated glosses for words that are not in the focus of attention for a particular section (e.g., š’ə-š’-ew loc-get.out.of-adv ‘of’ may be glossed as of-adv in examples demonstrating unrelated issues).
- 2.
In Adyghe, there is no good phonetic or phonological reason to divide phrases into words. Inflectional morphology clearly indicates that a phrase is at least a separate word – however, if such morphology attaches to an entire phrase, as for example is the case with case and number inflections on a DP, there are no independent reasons to suggest that a subconstituent (an adjective, in case of DP) is a separate word. Therefore, one should keep in mind that a notion of word is largely irrelevant and meaningless. Separating NP subconstituents into words, I will follow the conventions of Adyghe standard orthography: a one-syllable constituent forms a single word with the head, a more than one syllable word is written separately.
- 3.
-me is a fused marker for ‘obl+pl’, which alternates freely with regular inflection set -xe-m ‘-pl-obl’.
- 4.
zə ‘one’ is the only numeral which can combine with g w er e as an existential quantifier (for other uses, see Section 2.3.1.4 ‘Almost/Approximately’).
- 5.
This is probably the same suffix -e- which is used for forming complex numerals in Adyghe, such as š’-e-č̣’ə three-tmp-ten ‘thirty’ (Rogava and Keraševa (1966) suggest that č̣’ə in š’eč̣’ə is a form of pṣ̂ ə ‘ten’)
- 6.
The verb χ w ə- does not belong to the class of core existential/locative predicates and has an extremely wide array of other meanings and uses, however. I list it here because in certain subclass of cases, it patterns on a par with the core existential predicates. Addressing the semantics of this verb and the constraints associated with it is far beyond the scope of this study.
- 7.
Absolutive agreement with cardinal QNPs on the core existential verbs is somewhat degraded for the majority of speakers I consulted with. The exact reasons for that would be subject for further investigation.
- 8.
‘Metalanguage’ in the sense of (Matthewson 2004), i.e., the language different from the object-language, that is used for elicitation.
- 9.
šə ‘horse’ does not take the lnk morpheme that is usually used when merging a noun with a number.
- 10.
CM – case marker.
- 11.
I share an anonymous reviewer’s concern that it would be desirable to have a way to ensure ʁeṣ̂eʁ w enew is not a high-level adverb adjoining to a bigger constituent.
- 12.
Circumfixes and split morphemes are glossed so that every part of them is marked with ‘$’ and the translation of the entire morpheme’s meaning is given in parenthesis after the last part of the morpheme. If one of the parts forming the split morpheme can be translated on its own, the translation is given right after the $ sign.
- 13.
P. Arkadjev suggests an alternative analysis of rjenew, which predicts that non-finite negation of it will sound as rjemənew and its finite negation will sound as rjenərep. I performed a search of Adyghe mass media and texts and found that the suggested forms are not attested either.
- 14.
One of the anonymous reviewers voices a concern that availability of multiple wh-questions is unexpected with cleft-based questions. First, multiple wh-questions in Adyghe were documented at least as early as 2003; second, I doubt that their availability is truly unexpected: Adyghe has both clefts and wh-in-situ strategies available for forming wh-questions. When there are two question words, one of them raises to form a cleft, and the other one stays in situ, because at that point another cleft cannot be formed.
Moreover, if multiple wh-in-situ were indeed prohibited with a cleft strategy, it should still be available with wh-in-situ strategy. However, my consultants volunteered the examples I state here, and never offered a wh-in-situ sentence in response to the stimuli.
Some of the consultants stated that they could not find a grammatical translation for a sentence with two identical wh-words (like ‘Who saw who?’). But even for them, the effect would go away once the two wh-phrases were made sufficiently distinct (like ‘Who saw which girl?’ or ‘Who saw what?’). Thus, I conclude, we may be looking at a case of Distinctness violations (Richards 2010, 56), and not the constraints imposed by the cleft structure.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Khamerzokov family for their great help and hospitality; all the consultants who worked with me for their incredible patience and inexhaustible enthusiasm, as well as all the participants and organizers of the fieldwork trip to the Adyghe Republic in 2010. I am also very grateful to two anonymous reviewers, Jeremy Hartman, and especially Petr Arkadjev for their comments, which improved the paper considerably. Finally, no words will suffice to thank Yakov Georgievich Testelets for all his support, feedback and advice (as well as for dragging me into this exciting project). All errors are exclusively mine.
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Nikolaeva, L. (2012). Quantifiers in Adyghe. In: Keenan, E., Paperno, D. (eds) Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 90. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2681-9_2
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