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Article published In: Linguistic Variation
Vol. 25:2 (2025) ► pp.346–374

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The emergence of clausal nominalizations in Laz

ORCiD logo with link | Boğaziçi University
 | Boğaziçi University
Published online: 19 September 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.22045.dem
Abstract
This paper presents a survey of complementation strategies that are employed in Pazar and Ardesheni dialects of Laz, an endangered South Caucasian language that has been in contact with Turkish for decades. Our survey reveals strong signatures of contact in that nominalization patterns not present in cognate systems but present in Turkish seem to have been transferred into Laz. An intriguing asymmetry concerning the two dialects is that the Turkish noninalization pattern seems to have been directly copied into Pazar Laz whereas Ardesheni Laz seems to have developed a novel complementation pattern that mixes finite complementation with nominalization. Furthermore, in both dialects, complement clauses that denote propositions remain untouched by the dominant nominalization strategy in Turkish, raising questions on grammatical asymmetries in susceptibility to contact effects.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background on Turkish and Laz
    • 2.1Turkish
    • 2.2Laz
  • 3.Propositional complements in Laz
    • 3.1Finite complementation in Laz: An overview
    • 3.2No contact effects in propositional complementation
  • 4.Control complements in Laz
    • 4.1Masdar complements in control environments
    • 4.2Are there contact effects in control complements?
  • 5.Situation complements
    • 5.1Pazar dialect of Laz
    • 5.2Ardesheni dialect of Laz
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
References (36)
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