Comprehension of relative clauses in West Circassian (Adyghe) language

Ergativity, as one of the main features of ergative languages, consists in the fact that arguments are aligned and encoded in these languages differently than in languages with accusative object marking. The ergative syntax remains the field of investigation in contemporary linguistics (Polinksy, 2019; Polinsky et al., 2012).

The goal of our study is to identify the main difficulties that speakers of the Adyghe language may encounter when reading and understanding relative clauses in the ergative construction. To answer this question, an eye-tracking experiment is conducted - an experiment with the recording of eye movements while reading sentences from a computer screen.

The experiment includes four conditions:

(AO):  Cабыип1ум ыгъэшхэгъэ пшъашъэр чъыен фае.

(The girl whom the nanny fed should sleep.)

(ES): Сабыип1ур зыгъэшхэгъэ пшъашъэр чъыен фае.

(The girl who fed the nanny should sleep.)

(AS): Пшъашъэм фэзэщыгъэ к1алэр чыжьэу щэпсэу.

(The boy who missed the girl lives far away.)

(EO): Пшъашъэр зыфэзэщыгъэ к1алэр чыжьэу щэпсэу.

(The boy whom the girl missed lives far away.)

The study is conducted in collaboration with colleagues from the Laboratory of Experimental Linguistics at Adyghe State University.

 
In the picture: Shamsat Unarokova, a research fellow of the Laboratory of Experimental Linguistics at Adyghe State University, during her internship at the Center for Language and Brain, working on the development of stimuli for the experiment.

References:

1.     Polinksy, Maria. 2019. Subject preference and ergativity: syntax and real-time phenomena. From Summer Neurolinguistics School, Moscow, HSE, July 1-3, 2019 (slides from the talk).

2. Carlos Gomez Gallo, Peter Graff, and Ekaterina Kravtchenko. 2012. Subject preference and ergativity. Lingua 122(3): 267-277.