Alexander Letuchiy (HSE University) Abaza masdars: what regulates the choice of marking?

In this talk, I focus on the types and properties of masdars (nominalizations) in Abaza (a language of the West Caucasian family spoken in Russia). A special feature of Abaza is that it has one marker of masdar (the suffix -ra) – however, masdars themselves fall into several types, based on the person marking. Masdars can inherit the argument marking from the verb (the polypersonal agreement with A and DO of transitive verbs, as well as S and IO of intransitive verbs), show possessive agreement with the argument of the masdar, take a definiteness marker a- or remain unmarked in the prefixal part. In this case, the Abaza system of masdars is rich and poor at the same time.
Each type of masdar marking is in a sense a separate complementation strategy. The four strategies are not freely combined with any matrix verb, but chosen according to semantics of the matrix verb (especially reality- and modality-related properties) and syntactic properties of the construction. Although Abaza has no canonical control structures, some features of masdar constructions are reminiscent of control / restructuring phenomena.
The existence of several masdar types are compatible with the fact that nominalizations, including masdars in Caucasian languages, occupy an intermediate place in the system: on the one hand, they denote a situation and inherit many verbal properties; on the other hand, they get some nominal properties. However, very often, as in English or Arabic, it is the syntactic construction with a nominalization that shows similarities with verbal vs. nominal constructions. In Abaza, this intermediate nature of nominalization is manifested in morphology.
The data, considered in the talk, are collected during fieldwork organized by the HSE University in 2024.