Left-dislocated topic in West Caucasian languages

Abstract

This paper considers dislocated topics in living West Caucasian (Abkhaz-Adyghe) languages, i. e. in West Circassian, Kabardian, Abkhaz, and Abaza. Despite the fact that previous studies on morphosyntactic properties of the representatives of this language family denied the existence of dedicated topic constructions in any of them, the results of the present study allow us to assert that there are at least two grammaticalized patterns that introduce topics without integrating them into the subsequent related clause. The first construction containing simple dislocated topics either leaves them unmarked or (in West Circassian and Kabardian) marks them with the absolutive case. The second construction marks the dislocated topic or a combination of the topic with a copula with a conditional marker. These two strategies are typologically widespread and are attested in other — indigenous Caucasian and Turkic — languages of the area. However, even though both patterns under consideration can be described as left dislocation, they differ in terms of their distribution. In particular, only the construction marking the topic with a conditional suffix allows indefinite and quantified topics (which are in general unexpected in such constructions). Besides, we discuss specific constructions in which the topic expression defines the situation mentioned further (also referred to as “predicate clefts” and “predicate topicalization” in the literature). While in most cases described so far this phenomenon involves the obligatory repetition of the predicate (or its replacement with a proform in the clause), at least West Circassian does not show any requirement of this kind. The data include both examples retrieved from corpora (for West Circassian, Kabardian and Abaza) and examples obtained through elicitation.