Scholarly record

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PRINCIPAL PARTS OF SENTENCES IN THE CAUCASIAN LANGUAGES IN COMPARISON WITH FRENCH AND RUSSIAN

M. Gazilov, M. Gozalova, A. Avagyan

Abstract

Caucasus is a land of various languages, but the Republic of Dagestan often called a В‘mountain of languagesВ’ is especially endowed with them. This В‘mountainВ’ consists, first of all, of languages spoken by the indigenous population. Among them is the language under the present research, Avar. It is an ancient language which has not been studied deep enough (as well as the history of Avars) and needs a detailed linguistic characterization. In contrast, the French language which has a larger number of speakers has been studied much deeper. Its development can be traced through several centuries. The object of this research is represented by principal parts of sentences in the Avar language compared to similar structures in the French and Russian languages. Therefore, this article describes a structure of simple sentences in Avar as one of the least studied Caucasian languages. Firstly, general characteristics of a predicate in the Avar language are presented. Secondly, a nature of its structure is compared to the French and Russian languages. Thirdly, this paper discusses specific features of an Avar sentence which contribute to faster language learning and help to avoid interference as one of popular language phenomena leading to mistakes. The research method applied to the present study is a comparative analysis. It has been chosen to show explicit differences and similarities of syntactical patterns in the languages under research. In addition, the method of comparative analysis is especially applicable in linguistics when research involves two or more languages which belong to different language families, as in the present research. To some extent, one of the reasons for choosing French which genealogically, geographically, typologically and statistically differs from the Avar language is the intensive development of socio-political and economic processes in the Caucasus. Another reason is a growing need for foreign language acquisition in our modern society.

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