Morphological Features of the Speech of the Inhabitants of the Merisi Gorge

Abstract

The present paper deals with certain morphological features of the speech of the Merisi Gorge, one of the distinctive units of the Ajarian dialect. The study is based on the empirical material and authentic speech collected by me as a result of field dialectological research. The paper discusses in detail the grammatical phenomena manifested in noun form-building, verb structure, the functioning of preverbs, and the specific use of auxiliary parts of speech (conjunctions, postpositions, and particles). The analysis of the linguistic material of the Merisi Gorge will make a significant contribution to revealing the characteristic features of the speech of Upper Ajara, while the study of the Ajarian dialect will provide us with a compre­hensive understanding of the southern speech of the Georgian language.

The article draws upon studies and research conducted as a result of observations of the southern speech varieties. It should be noted that many linguistic phenomena have been re-examined by modern scholarship, which has presented the distinctive features of the southern dialects in a more comprehensive manner.

In preparing the article, we employed the methods of empirical data processing, the historical-comparative method, description, analysis, synthesis, and comparison.