The topic of the book is the so called “Focus particles” and their interaction with the word order regularities in Georgian, as the most prominent representative of the south caucasian or Kartvelian language family of the official language of the republic of Georgia and which is also known in the general linguistics as a language with mostly “free” word order.

The present book analyzes the nominal domain in the Georgian language in its diachronic development. In Georgian, the noun phrase went through crucial changes over the centuries on various levels -- morphological, morpho-syntactic, syntactic, semantic, and typological. The peculiarities of its structures are discussed and illustrated across all developmental stages of the Georgian language: Old, Middle and Modern Georgian. As its empirical basis, the study builds upon statistical accounts of corpus materials yielding insight into the structure of the Georgian language and its changes over time. In addition to the empirically-based analyses, several theories are reviewed (e.g., the issues of Middle Georgian being a developmental stage of the language in its own right or of Georgian being a DP-language) in order to contribute to determining the linguistic position of Georgian and to pave the way for further typological research.

The topic of the book is the so called “Focus particles” and their interaction with the word order regularities in Georgian, as the most prominent representative of the south caucasian or Kartvelian language family of the official language of the republic of Georgia and which is also known in the general linguistics as a language with mostly “free” word order.

This monograph analyses the grammatical, pragmatic, communicative and lexical-stylistic functions of different subgroups of synthetic dynamic passives in Georgian. They differ from the standard average European type, and the complexity of Georgian verbal diathesis is of a more general linguistic interest. In an introductory section, the book offers a detailed and critical review of the rich and relevant literature of the Georgian and other traditions. – On the basis of a vast corpus taken from a 1500 years old tradition of literary texts, several specific tendencies are established in the evolution of so-called affixed dynamic passives, and possible factors favouring these tendencies are considered. In this context, the evolution of the voice opposition from Old Georgian up to Modern Georgian is analysed, in particular the relation between prefixed and suffixed types of the Georgian passive, and possible cases of influence of the dominant Greek source language on the use of morphological passives are verified in Old Georgian translated texts.