Direct Semantic marking in Kartvelian Languages and the Problem of Inversion of Personal Markers

Irine G. Melikishvili (Tbilisi State Univerity, Georgia )

Between the two different kinds of strategy that languages employ for marking "who is doing what to who", which can be called as (1)syntactically based and (2) semantically based marking, Kartvelian (South Caucasian) languages (Georgian, Megrelian, Laz, Svan) follow the semantic principle of marking of verb arguments. The two series of person markers (v-and m-) are functioning as markers of active, volitional, controlling the action participants opposed to affected, not volitional participants of speech event. It can be regarded as the opposition of active/inactive verb arguments. The functioning of these series of markers is independent of syntactic roles of the participants, such as subject and object. In this opposition the series v-is unmarked and the series m-is marked. Kartvelian languages systematically distinguish between the controlled, volitional and uncontrolled, not volitional action. The series m-marks the affected, perceiving, beneficiary possessing experiencing participants of action. Such marking is to be considered as a direct semantic marking and there is no ground to qualify it as the inversion of personal markers.
The main task of this paper is to provide a conceptual apparatus of a logical general theory of language communication that takes into account the following three aspects: