Linguistic acceptability study reveals distinct grammatical co-analyses of placeholder verbs in colloquial Georgian, suggesting analytical biases shape ongoing grammaticalization.
Key Points
To investigate the morphological variation and underlying syntactic structures of newly emergent placeholder verbs derived from the phrase 'do that' in colloquial Georgian.
Formulated four theoretical structural accounts for the reanalysis of the demonstrative pronoun within Georgian verbal morphology.
Conducted a morphological acceptability judgment study evaluating native speaker intuitions on placeholder verb forms.
Speaker judgments clustered into two distinct empirical profiles rather than reflecting a single uniform grammar.
Acceptability patterns strongly supported the extant-functional-head and morphological-anaphor analyses, leaving alternative structural hypotheses uninstantiated.