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Georgian and Svan As Dominantly Fusional Languages) IRENE MELIKISHVILI Tbilisi State University, Georgia Towards the Definition of Dominant Morphological Type of Georgian and Svan (Georgian and Svan as Dominantly Fusional Languages) Kartvelian Languages (Georgian, Svan, Megrelian-Laz) are often considered as agglutinative languages. In some handbooks on linguistics Georgian is even cited as an example of agglutinative languages. Morphological typology is a holistic characteristic of languages. It not only reflects the techniques of combination of morphemes into words, but can be regarded as a deep cognitive, psycholinguistic, ethnolinguistic characteristic of the language. It reveals the concept of the word in the language – is it a chain (a simple sum) of autonomous morphemes or a whole unit? This must be the reason for the very slow change of morphological type of languages. Though the constructions may undergo cyclic changes in the languages: analytic > agglutinative > fusional > analytic - the language as a rule preserves its main character: dominantly agglutinative languages eliminate the fusional constructions through unification processes and fusional languages overcome agglutinative constructions through morphonological changes. N. Trubetzkoy ascribed to the morphological type of the language so high value that he posited this feature in the definition of the genetic unity of languages. Poor versus rich morphonology is the morphonological implication of the distinction agglutinative/fusional. Georgian and Svan have very rich morphonology. As an additional morphonological characteristic we can posit the direction of phonetic processes: in agglutinative languages interaction of phonemes is dominantly progressive - preceding phonemes influence following ones (vowel harmony and also consonantal changes); in fusional languages the morphonological changes are predominantly regressive – subsequent phonemes influence preceding ones (umlaut and other phonetic changes). The intention of the speaker in fusional language is the whole word form and so the preceding anticipates the following. In this sense Georgian and Svan also share this property of fusional languages, as most of the morphonological changes have regressive character. There are a number of quantitative and qualitative alternations where the change of the root vowel determines the change of grammatical meaning, e.g. txar-a “he dug” - txr-a “to dig”; drik-a “he bent” - drek-a “to bend” - [še]-drka - passive form of this verb. The vowel alternation is more distributed In verbal inflection than in noun inflection, though in the noun system there are also many alternations. For inflectional types the lists of nouns must be given, because the irregularity of the alternations (e.g. bal-i “cherry”, bl-eb-i “cherries”, kal-i “woman”, kal-eb-i “women”); in Svan 6 grades of morphologically relevant vowel alternations are attested: a/e/i/ə/ī/Ø: e.g. for the verb with the meaning “untie” - a-pašg, li-pešg, a-pəšg, a-pišg, lə-pīšg, li-pšge; Morphology in Georgian is very irregular. The case system has at least 5 subtypes. The verb system is far more complicated – modern investigations distinguish 64 paradigms, the members of each must be presented as a list, for no automatic rules can be stated for the arrangement of verb roots into inflectional types. In Svan the irregularity is even higher. Simple relations are rare between form and meaning in the verb system. One morpheme can express person and number (gv-, -es, -en, -nen…), case and number (-ta), aspect, tense and orientation, version, voice, tense, aspect… There are a number of categories, where a morphologically complex form corresponds as a whole with the grammatical meaning – e.g. 1 perfect forms consist of possessive version morphemes i-, u-, of the state marker -i, but the meanings of constituent morphemes have no autonomous value, their meaning is merged in the resulting perfect category. The system reconstructed for Common Kartvelian has even more fusional features. A rough calculation for the Greenbergian index of agglutination/fusion gives 0.40 for Georgian and 0.32 for Svan. This puts them in the class of fusional languages. More material evidencing the dominantly fusional character of Georgian and Svan will be presented in the paper. 2 .
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