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Origins Of Apparent Violations Of The “No Phrase” Constraint In Modern Georgian, Alice Carmichael Harris

Alice Harris

It is widely suggested in the literature that words are based on words, roots, or stems, but not on phrases (the "No Phrase" Constraint). In Modern Georgian, constructions such as megobar-ta-gan-i '[one, some] of the friends' are common; they appear to violate the "No Phrase" Constraint because gan 'from' is traditionally considered a postposition. In this example, -i, the marker of the nominative case, serves as both inflectional and derivational morphology, deriving a substantive, apparently from the postpositional phrase. The paper demonstrates that the construction at issue originated in double case marking. Old Georgia had case marking of this sort, …