Lexical and compositional factors in the aspectual system of Adyghe

This paper deals with different components of aspectual interpretation in Adyghe, a polysynthetic North-West Caucasian language, and hierarchical relations among them. Following Tatevosov (2002), I propose a classification of Adyghe predicates into actional classes, and then show how this classification can account for the distribution of temporal adverbials. I argue that temporal adverbials in Adyghe are able to shift the lexically specified actional characteristic of the predicate (coercion in the sense of de Swart 1998) and thus constitute a separate level of aspectually relevant operators intermediate between lexical and grammatical aspect.