Ergativity in the Adyghe system of valency- changing derivations Alexander Letuchiy, Higher School of Economics, Moscow 1. Introduction In this paper I will analyse the syntactic properties of valency-changing derivations and other syntactic processes in Adyghe (a language of the West Caucasian family spoken in the Republic of Adygheya and the Krasnodar region of Russia, and also in some countries of western Asia such as Turkey). My aim is to determine whether these processes testify to syntactic ergativity or accusativity in Adyghe, or whether they in fact shed no light at all on the question of Adyghe alignment behaviour. In traditional descriptions, such as Rogava & Keras ˇeva (1966), Kumakhov (1984), and Zekox (2002), it is taken for granted that Adyghe has ergative alignment. This is due to the fact that Adyghe is a morphologically ergative language (see below). As I will show, the case marking of verb arguments and the system of cross-reference markers are indeed organized ergatively. However, with the exceptions of Serdobol’skaya (2007) and Lander (2009), scholars have not considered the syntactic aspects of ergativity in Adyghe. In the present paper, I base my analysis of syntactic ergativity on the evidence of valency-changing derivation only. I choose not to consider other pivot properties related to ergativity / accusativity (coordination reduction, relativization, subordinate clauses etc.; see Dixon 1994; Van Valin and LaPolla 1997). It seems to me more justifiable to restrict myself to the data presented by derivational behaviour alone, since in a single article it is impossible to analyse the whole range of data related to erga- tivity in a polysynthetic language like Adyghe; moreover, the valency- changing derivational system may be organized ergatively, for example, while other syntactic processes are organized accusatively, or vice versa. We assume that voice systems and syntactic alignment are closely related. On one hand, many linguists (e.g., Shibatani 1985, Dixon 1994) claim that syntactic alignment is crucial for the the voice system of a language. For instance, it has long been thought that the passive is not a 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 (V9 13/1/12 00:44) WDG-LCB (155mm230mm) TimesNRMT 1351 Authier pp. 321–352 1351 Authier_10_letuchiy (p. 321)