Producing Polysynthetic Verb Forms in West Circassian (Adyghe) : An Experimental Study

This paper describes a pilot experiment which was conducted by the authors with speakers of the polysynthetic West Circassian (Adyghe) language and aimed at investigating their ability to use complex verb forms that cross-reference several arguments introduced by applicative morphology. The results of the experiment support the view that complex polysynthetic words can be constructed in the course of speech and do not necessarily belong to any common inventory of word forms. In addition, we make several conclusions which concern productivity of applicatives and their order within the West Circassian verb