The Northwest Caucasian Languages

Author(s):  
Peter Arkadiev ◽  
Yury Lander

This chapter describes the major features of the Northwest Caucasian (Abkhaz-Adyghe) language family, comprising Abkhaz, Abaza, West Circassian (Adyghe), East Circassian (Kabardian), and the now extinct Ubykh. Starting with the sociolinguistic setting of the Northwest Caucasian varieties and the history of linguistic research on them, the discussion then proceeds to a description of the most important features of their phonology, morphology, and syntax, concluding with a brief discussion of a number of typologically outstanding features. The chapter, based both on published sources and the authors’ fieldwork data, covers issues such as exuberant consonantism, lexical category underspecification, polysynthetic morphology, expression of spatial meanings in the verb, rich systems of tense, aspect and mood categories, finite and non-finite verbal forms, non-trivial noun phrase syntax, relativization, and complexities of clause-combining. Besides describing the features common for all the languages of the family, we focus on important points of variation among the Northwest Caucasian languages and their dialects, aiming at an adequate representation of the wealth of phenomena they present and highlighting the challenges they offer for typology and linguistic theory.

Author(s):  
Yakov G. Testelets

The chapter contains a description of the small Kartvelian, or South Caucasian, language family spoken in the Western part of Transcaucasia and consisting of four languages of which Georgian is the most known and culturally significant. It outlines the structure of the family and the problem of its further genetic affiliation and contains sociolinguistic information, history of its research, basic characteristics of phonology, including a rich consonantal system with unusual consonant clusters, lexical classes, morphology of nominals and verbs, with special emphasis on complexity of the verb and the syntactically motivated morphological classes and processes like valency-changing derivation (benefactive, causative), structure of noun phrases and the role of case marking, simple clause, word order, anaphora, complex sentence, and the role of the three major grammatical relations: Subject, Direct Object, and Indirect Object that dominate in the morphology and syntax; the areal and typological profile of the Kartvelian languages; and issues for further research.


2019 ◽  
pp. 103-143
Author(s):  
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald

This chapter addresses the issue of coexistence of noun categorization devices within one language. Genders and other noun categorization devices—be they numeral classifiers, or other classifiers—are generally thought of as being relatively independent from one another. Co-existing and overlapping systems of genders and classifiers are cross-linguistically uncommon. The chapter shows that this is a feature of some Arawak languages from north-west Amazonia, two genders—feminine and non-feminine—are obligatorily marked on verbs and nouns, and demonstratives and other modifiers within a noun phrase. Classifiers used on number words, and in a variety of other contexts, categorize the noun in terms of its physical properties, and distinguish gender. Gender is thus integrated within the system of classifiers. Gender markers may co-occur with classifiers in one word. The chapter concludes that gender distinctions and gender markers are uniform across the Arawak language family, and can be reconstructed for the proto-language. The chapter proposes that classifiers may have developed separately in each subgroup within the family.


Author(s):  
Victor Porkhomovsky

The chapter presents a short sketch of the history of the Afro-Asiatic language family (often labeled a macro-family or language phylum), beginning with the history of the names Semitic and Hamitic. Changes in the composition of Afro-Asiatic are examined with a special focus on the correlation between Semitic and Hamitic. The place of Hamitic theory in Hamito-Semitic studies and its theoretical premises are discussed, as well as the reasons to reject the concept of original binary composition of the family and the very notion of Hamitic. All this led to changing the name of the family from Hamito-Semitic to Afro-Asiatic, which comprises five or six independent branches: Semitic, Ancient Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and Omotic (as an independent branch or part of Cushitic). The present state of the art in comparative Afro-Asiatic and possible external links of Afro-Asiatic are also discussed.


Author(s):  
Rik van Gijn ◽  
Ana Vilacy Galucio ◽  
Antonia Fernanda Nogueira

Abstract: Assessing the internal coherence and constituency of language families often centers either around comparing certain form-meaning correspondences, or around identifying the presence or absence of linguistic features across the members of the family. The former approach is generally restricted to the lexicon. The latter approach focuses mostly on structural characteristics of language. In this paper we present an alternative approach to comparing grammatical systems between languages within a language family, which aims at bringing these two approaches and their results closer to each other. We look at subordination strategies in a sample of Tupian languages, taking constructions as the basic unit of comparison, treating them as form-meaning correspondences. The Tupian family offers an especially intriguing case for studying subordination strategies in the South American context, given its enormous geographical spread and the variety of contact situations involving its member languages. Major patterns of subordination strategies can be discerned across the family, e.g. strategies involving nominalization, verbal incorporation and other subtypes of verbal serialization, but there is also a great degree of variability between the different languages. By mapping the structural diversity onto the known genealogy and geographic distribution, we hope to shed more light on the history of the Tupian family and on the diffusability of subordination strategies.


1985 ◽  
Vol 54 (04) ◽  
pp. 744-745 ◽  
Author(s):  
R Vikydal ◽  
C Korninger ◽  
P A Kyrle ◽  
H Niessner ◽  
I Pabinger ◽  
...  

SummaryAntithrombin-III activity was determined in 752 patients with a history of venous thrombosis and/or pulmonary embolism. 54 patients (7.18%) had an antithrombin-III activity below the normal range. Among these were 13 patients (1.73%) with proven hereditary deficiency. 14 patients were judged to have probable hereditary antithrombin-III deficiency, because they had a positive family history, but antithrombin-III deficiency could not be verified in other members of the family. In the 27 remaining patients (most of them with only slight deficiency) hereditary antithrombin-III deficiency was unlikely. The prevalence of hereditary antithrombin-III deficiency was higher in patients with recurrent venous thrombosis.


2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett Kahr

Few books in the burgeoning field of couple psychoanalysis have garnered as much admiration as James Fisher's The Uninvited Guest: Emerging from Narcissism towards Marriage. In this memorial essay, the author pays tribute to the late Dr Fisher and to his perennial book which explores the ways in which pathological narcissism, among other factors, inhibit the development of spousal intimacy, often destroying partnerships entirely. The author describes the creative way in which Fisher drew upon great works of literature, most notably William Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale, and T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party, as well as long-forgotten clinical material from Fisher's predecessors at the Family Discussion Bureau (forerunner of the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships), in order to understand the ways in which marital partners struggle with false self couplings. The author assesses the importance of Fisher's contribution in the context of the history of couple psychoanalysis.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Zaidan Ali Jassem

This paper traces the Arabic origins or cognates of the “definite articles” in English and Indo-European languages from a radical linguistic (or lexical root) theory perspective. The data comprises the definite articles in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Latin, Greek, Macedonian, Russian, Polish, Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Persian, and Arabic. The results clearly indicate that five different types of such articles emerged in the data, all of which have true Arabic cognates with the same or similar forms and meanings, whose differences are due to natural and plausible causes and different routes of linguistic change, especially lexical, semantic, or morphological shift. Therefore, the results support the adequacy of the radical linguistic theory according to which, unlike the Family Tree Model or Comparative Method, Arabic, English, German, French, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit not only belong to the same language family, renamed Eurabian or Urban family, but also are dialects of the same language, with Arabic being their origin all because only it shares the whole cognates with them all and because it has a huge phonetic, morphological, grammatical, and lexical variety. They also manifest fundamental flaws and grave drawbacks which plague English and Indo-European lexicography for ignoring Arabic as an ultimate ancestor and progenitor not only in the treatment of the topic at hand but in all others in general. On a more general level, they also show that there is a radical language from which all human languages stemmed and which has been preserved almost intact in Arabic, thus being the most conservative and productive language


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-255
Author(s):  
Maria Magdalena Setyaningsih ◽  
Emy Sutiyarsih

Kehamilan remaja adalah kehamilan yang terjadi pada remaja berusia kurang dari 20 tahunan. Kehamilan remaja memberikan banyak kerugian bagi kesehatan, mental dan psikologis, kesejahteraan ekonomi dan peluang karier, kemiskinan dan prospek kehidupan masa depan remaja. Tujuan penelitian mengidentifikasi faktor determinan yang melatarbelakangi terjadinya kehamilan remaja. Jenis penelitian adalah penelitian analitik kategorik jenis survei kuantitatif dengan desain case control. Populasi semua perempuan yang bertempat tinggal di wilayah dusun Wonosari, Sukosari, dan Krajan Pandansari dan pernah/sedang hamil pertama kali pada usia kurang dari 20 tahun. Teknik pengambilan sampel cluster random sampling besar sampel 73. Berdasarkan hasil model akhir analisis multivariat, diketahui bahwa variabel pendidikan, riwayat kehamilan remaja pada keluarga dan usia menikah merupakan variabel yang berhubungan dengan kejadian kehamilan remaja setelah dikontrol oleh variabel akses informasi, responden berpendidikan rendah memiliki peluang 20,8 kali lebih tinggi, responden yang memiliki riwayat kehamilan remaja pada keluarga memiliki peluang 14,9 kali lebih tinggi, responden yang menikah pada usia <20 tahun memiliki peluang 12,1 kali lebih tinggi, responden dengan pemahaman yang kurang baik terkait penggunaan kondom memiliki peluang 5,9 kali lebih tinggi untuk terjadi kehamilan remaja. Oleh karena itu perlu dibangun karakter buiding, sosial karakter suport untuk para ibu remaja dan keluarga sehingga terbangun interaksi yang baik dalam keluarga yang dilandasi dengan pendidikan dan pemahaman yang baik tentang Pendidikan seksualitas. Teen pregnancy is a pregnancy that occurs in adolescents aged less than 20 years old. Teen pregnancy provides many disadvantages for health, mental, psychological, economic well-being, career opportunities, poverty, and the future life. The aim of the study was to identify the determinants underlying teen pregnancy incidence. This study was a quantitative study with categorical analytic method. The study design used a case control with two comparison groups. The groups were control group and case group. The population in this study was all women who lived in the Wonosari, Sukosari, and Krajan Pandansari district and had or were pregnant for the first time at the age of less than 20 years old. Seventy three respondents were recruited using cluster sampling technique. The case group consists of women who were or had pregnant for the first time at the age of less than 20 years old and their children are currently aged ≤ 1 years old. The control group consists of women who were pregnant for the first time at the age of > 20 years old. The data was collected using a questionnaire. The findings showed that education, history of teen pregnancy in family and the age of marriage were related to the incidence of teen pregnancy after being controlled by information access. Low-educated respondents had 20.8 times higher chance of experiencing teen pregnancy; respondents with a history of teen pregnancy in the family had 4.9 times higher chance of experiencing teen pregnancy; respondents who were married at the age of < 20 years old had 12.1 times higher chance of experiencing teen pregnancy; respondents with poor understanding of condom use had 5.9 times higher chance of teenage pregnancy. In conclusion, the findings suggest to build good interactions in the family based on education and a good understanding of sex education.


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