ИСТИНА

Ossetic subordination is characterized by a remarkable degree of uniformity, with the correlative construction being used not just for relatives proper, but for the majority of other clause types, including complement and adverbial clauses. Considering that correlatives are typical for Indo-European languages and seem to be seldom used in languages of the Caucasus, a plausible assumption is that this strategy is inherited from the proto-language. Yet there is evidence that demonstrates that Ossetic seems to have considerably remodeled, or even reinnovated, correlatives during the course of its history. Moreover, unlike the rest of the Iranian languages where this construction gradually disappeared, Ossetic has vastly expanded it. In this talk, I will demonstrate that this can be explained by contact with neighbouring North-West Caucasian languages, which also extensively employ relative-like constructions in their systems of subordination. However, since the particular constructions employed in these languages are syntactically rather different from the Ossetic system, we must conclude that we deal with contact-induced development of an originally native strategy rather than a case of pure metatypy.