Summary: | In the paper, we present new material to evaluate the theoretical assumptions and basic claims of the idea of “role languages” which was put forward in the linguistic typology about 1980 by William Foley, Robert Van Valin and Aleksandr E. Kibrik. Our point of special interest are the languages of the East and West Caucasian families, including the East Caucasian languages of Dagestan which Kibrik claimed to belong to the role type. Role languages are those in which the morphosyntactic marking of arguments are directly determined by semantic roles, with no intermediate level of grammatical relations like subject and object. It is shown that the characteristics of case marking of verbs’ arguments, lack of the passive voice, neutrality or role orientation of functional priority features do not correlate and most likely do not form any consistent “role type”.
|