Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
closed access
The thesis focuses on Megrelian, a language spoken by approximately 500.000 people in the west of the country of Georgia. It is genealogically related to Georgian, the official language of the...Show moreThe thesis focuses on Megrelian, a language spoken by approximately 500.000 people in the west of the country of Georgia. It is genealogically related to Georgian, the official language of the country. Every speaker of Megrelian is bilingual and speaks Georgian from an early age onwards. Georgian is the language of bureaucracy, education and virtually all written communication. Hence, a lot of influence of this standard language on Megrelian is to be expected. However, this influence has not been studied yet (at least not outside Georgia). In addition, Megrelian features several strategies for the grammatical concept of subordination. It shows a conjunction /namda/, which is functionally parallel to English 'that', in 'I saw that John arrived', and finds its parallel in Georgian /rom/. Furthermore, an enclitic element /=ni/ can be added to the end of the embedded clause (in adverbial, complement, and relative clauses alike). /namda/ and /=ni/ can also be combined. Also, Megrelian has several ways to nominalise verbs, which can then be used to form subordinated clauses. This thesis will explore the different strategies of subordination in Megrelian and will try to distinguish which strategy is used for which function. Furthermore, while the Georgian language is bound to have influence on the minority language, it interesting to see if it will also have its impact on a syntactic operation like subordination. In terms of data, it is of interest that numerous folk tales and poems in Megrelian have been gathered around the turn of the century by Georgian scholars, although in more recent years, the amount of fieldwork is very sparse. This thesis seeks to combine these two sources and add contemporary data of spoken Megrelian, as well as make public some of the older narratives.Show less
