Chechen Language Literature and Documentation

Abstract

This paper focuses upon certain aspects of the noun and verb morphology of Chechen, a language indigenous to the North Caucasus. In this paper I compiled, compared and analysed existing literature alongside speech data to assess the state of academia on the language, and to provide insight on what may be missing, and what may need more analysis. In several instances, I found discrepancies both between certain texts and between the texts and what I was observing in the data. The topics covered are the Chechen noun classes and gender marker pairs, the converb system, imperative constructions, and the morpheme ma.

First, I provide an explanation of both the linguistic structures being discussed and present what is stated by the literature. I then use the data I gathered for this project to verify what is stated by the literature, and to show how it does or does not match what I found in actual speech.

For the noun classes, I show that the classes are not strictly divided by humanness, and that the first two are exclusive to animate and human-like nouns, but not purely human nouns. I analysed the converb system as presented in Molochieva (2010) and provide further insights that were missed, argue that the ‘converb with a postposition’ is actually a participle, as well as propose that certain converbs are capable of combining to create more complicated meanings. I outline what the literature says on the imperative and fill in the plural polite imperative that was unmentioned in the literature. For the morpheme ma, I show that it is used both as an emphatic morpheme and a negating imperative morpheme in different contexts.

Throughout, I aim to provide context for the literature that I am sourcing as well as the situation of the Chechen speakers, and why it is so important to not only have an awareness of what has been done but to understand the context in which it was done.