Abstract : 

In this paper I discuss a typologically peculiar inverse-like construction found in the polysynthetic ergative Circassian languages of the Northwest-Caucasian family and argue that this construction has been borrowed into Abaza belonging to a different branch of the same family. These languages possess cislocative verbal prefixes, which, in addition to marking the spatial meaning of speaker-orientation, systematically occur in polyvalent verbs when the object outranks the subject on the person hierarchy. The inverse-like use of the cislocative in Circassian differs from the “canonical” direct-inverse system in that, first, it is fully redundant since the person-role linking is achieved by means of the person markers themselves and, second, it does not occur in the basic transitive construction, featuring instead in configurations involving an indirect object both in ditransitive and bivalent intransitive verbs. I argue that the similar use of the cislocative prefix observed in Abaza is a result…