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This paper describes a group of derivational verbal suffixes in Abaza, a polysynthetic language belonging to the Northwest Caucasian family. For each suffix I propose a short description of its most remarkable features. In particular, I discuss the polysemy of the refactive and assertive markers and their interaction with the event structure of the verb. Other suffixes such as the putative and inferential markers are interesting due to their peculiar morphological behavior. The diversity of the discussed affixes is tentatively explained by the different pathways of their morphological and semantic development.

This paper describes the behavior of a subordination marker -n in modal necessity constructions in West Circassian, a polysynthetic language belonging to the Northwest Caucasian family. We show that -n functions as a simple suffix in the non-epistemic construction and as a phrasal affix in the epistemic construction. Hence, this morpheme violates the principle according to which the formal characteristics of a linguistic element should remain the same in different contexts of its use. This violation is explained by the difference in the semantic contribution of the suffix under discussion in different patterns and by the typological specifics of West Circassian, which allows its speakers to manipulate with morphemes more freely.

Although there exist comprehensive morphologically annotated corpora for many morphologically rich languages, there have been no such corpora for any polysynthetic language so far. Polysynthetic languages raise a variety of theoretical and practical challenges for corpus linguistics. Some of these challenges have been partly addressed when developing corpora for e. g. Turkic or Uralic languages, while others are unique for this kind of languages. Our paper identifies the most prominent challenges that we are facing in the course of development of West Circassian (Adyghe) corpus, and offer possible solutions. These include the tokenization problem, which involves delimiting morphology from syntax, the problem with lemmatization and part-of-speech tagging, and a number of glossing and search problems.