Languages of the Caucasus

One of the most striking particularities of Northern Akhvakh is the pervasiveness of a phonological process for which I use the term liaison, traditional in French linguistics. This phonological process blurs word boundaries, possibly resulting in various lexicalization and grammaticalization phenomena. In this paper, after describing the phonological process and discussing its conditioning, I examine itsrole in the evolution of the lexicon, the emergence of new grammatical forms, the development of infixation, and changes in the valency properties of Akhvakh verbs.