Eva Poliakova (HSE University) Field notes on Khwarshi: the biabsolutive construction and information structure (PART 2)

This talk will be dedicated to two topics which were the focus of my research during a field trip to the Khwarshi language (Nakh-Daghestanian) that took place in January of this year. Therefore, the talk will be divided into two parts.
 
First, I will discuss the biabsolutive construction in Khwarshi. In this construction both arguments of a transitive verb are marked by the absolutive case, and the verb form is restricted to (periphrastic) progressive. I will discuss some of its properties, including ones that were not discussed before (e.g. its behavior in an embedded clause). I will also show that some speakers allow forming an absolutive construction not only with a progressive form, but also with a resultative one, though in this case some additional restrictions seem to hold.

Second, I will discuss some findings about information structure in Khwarshi. This topic was investigated mostly based on question-answer tasks and tasks involving picture description. I will show that different word orders can be used to mark focus in Khwarshi, including insertion of the focused constituent inside a periphrastic verb form and inversion of lexical verb and auxiliary.