Clause chaining in Adyghe (Northwest Caucasian)

Abstract This chapter explores clause chaining in Adyghe, a West Caucasian language. The major means of combining clauses into larger chains are the additive suffix, two general converbs, and two specialized converbs. Adyghe also has a number of conjunctions, but their use for the purpose of clause chaining is not very common. Morphosyntactically, the clause chaining constructions by means of the additive and the converbs exhibit properties of coordination and subordination, albeit to different degrees. In general, Adyghe does not clearly differentiate between verb forms that are mainly or exclusively used in main clause coordination (i.e. ‘finite’ verb form) and those that form subordinate clauses (‘non-finite’), which makes the analysis of clause chaining particularly challenging. In natural texts, clause chaining constructions are frequently used and mostly consist only of two or maximally three clauses of which the last clause is a main clause with a fully inflected verb form.