Towards a comparative syntax of the Kartvelian languages
George Hewitt When a classicist moves outside his field, it is a comfort to find unrelated languages behaving in a way with which he is familiar. At the same time, it is exciting to be faced with the challenge resulting from encounters with different structures. When the move takes the scholar to the Caucasus, the differences often seem to outweigh the similarities. Both the dedicatee of this volume and the author of this contribution have made this journey, and so it seemed appropriate to make available in a work designed for both Indo-Europeanists and caucasologists some unpublished materials gathered some years ago which present both types of data. This offering could be viewed as a modest expansion of, or supplement to, the wealth of information in Nia Abesadze's 1960 and 1963 papers on subordination in the Kartvelian languages (especially Svan), though her main concerns there were the subordinating elements themselves rather than the overall nature of the hypotactic constructions.
Georgian: A structural reference grammar
The Caucasus for its size can boast more languages than any other region on earth. Of the 40 or so native tongues Georgian is the most widely spoken (by up to 5 million, of whom 3 million are ethnic Georgians). With its own unique script, Georgian has been written since the 4th century and has a rich literature of all genres. Outside Georgia, however, it has remained virtually unknown and unstudied, its grammatical intricacies being discussed by a small but ever growing succession of foreign specialists. The present work represents the first Reference Grammar of this challenging language to appear in English and is the summation of 20 years of intensive study by its author.
Corpus Linguistics in Legal Discourse
There are many different ways in which modern Corpus Linguistics can be used to enrich and broaden our understanding of legal discourse. Based on the central principle of co-occurrence and co-selection in language construction, this paper reviews current applications of Corpus Linguistics in the area of legal discourse focusing on issues ranging from phraseology, variation in legal discourse, legal translation, register and genre perspectives on legal discourse, legal discourse in forensic contexts to evaluative language in judicial settings. It revisits the notion of ‘corpus’ and it highlights the relevance of various types of legal corpora and computer tools in legal linguistic research.