Spatial prefixes of Pazar Laz: a nano-syntactic approach

Abstract

This study investigates the spatial prefixal system of Pazar Laz, an endangered South Caucasian language. Specifically, it aims to provide a descriptive and syntactic account of the spatial verbal prefixes of PL, which encode elaborate information regarding the location or direction of motion events. For this purpose, we first comprehensively describe the spatial prefixes of PL by reference to the two picture series, namely Topological Relations Picture Series (Bowerman & Pederson, 1992) and Picture Series (Felix, Witte & Wilkins, 1999). PL is then examined under the typological classification system developed in Talmy (2000) and it is argued that the status of PL as a satellite-framed language is questionable as opposed to what has been suggested by Kutscher (2011). As opposed to the case in other satellite-framed languages like Germanic and Slavic, the spatial prefixes in PL exhibit selectivity with respect to the nature of the motion verbs they are compatible with. In order to account for this selectivity, we offer a classification for the motion verbs and the spatial prefixes in PL and then proceed to decompose both into their corresponding syntactic structures following Svenonius (2006), Folli and Ramchand (2005), Ramchand (2008) and Fabregas (2007). Based on this decomposition, we show that the possibility of using a dynamic spatial prefix with a motion verb seems to correlate with the presence of a Path projection within the lexical specification of the verb. The lexicalization of the relevant syntactic constructions are lastly analyzed under the framework of Nanosyntax (Starke, 2009 among others).