Speech Code Mixing in Nominal and Verbal Syntagms Based on “the Great Register of the Church of Abkhazia”

Abstract

The Georgian literary language historically occupied the highest stage in the dialect zones of Georgia, followed by the pseudo-literary speech code, while the lowest stage was occupied by dialectal codes and microcodes. This reality must have existed in urban zones as well, when the foundations of urban life were laid in Georgia, especially in the period after classical Old Georgian, when the grammatical norms of the old literary language gradually began to break down and folk speech occupied a wider place. A comparison of morphological forms and morphosyntactic constructions in church documents compiled in Imereti and the lapidarium of the same region with the data of modern dialect codes shows both differences and similarities. In the nominal and verbal syntagms, not only phenomena originating from the old Georgian literary language are found, but syntactic connections characteristic of modern Georgian are also given, pseudo literary and dialectal word combinations are presented, phenomena characteristic of contemporary dialects are also reflected; morphological forms and inventory used to protect the style of church texts, old Georgian graphemes, often erroneous, common facts for the compilers are found.