ABSTRACT
Georgian belongs to the Kartvelian or South Caucasian language family. A variety of semantic categories are marked in the Georgian verb: three distinct aspectual oppositions, along with tense, mood, valence, person, and number. Compared to the declension systems of the older Indo-European languages, Georgian nominal morphology is comparatively simple. One of the most bewildering aspects of Georgian grammar, at least for foreigners studying the language, is the phenomenon of case shift. The case-marking system of Georgian is similar to the “split-ergative” systems of some Indo-Iranian languages. The issue of language acquisition by children has received a fair amount of attention in the Georgian psychological literature. Some Georgian children in the diary studies pluralized mass nouns that do not take the plural number in adult Georgian. Some facts concerning Dali’s linguistic development are presented to provide a contrast to the data from monolingual Georgian children.
