Editing Northwest Caucasian languages (section)

===Grammar===
Northwest Caucasian languages have rather simple noun systems, with only a handful of cases at the most, coupled with highly [[agglutination|agglutinative]] verbal systems that can contain almost the entire syntactic structure of the sentence. All finite verbs are marked for agreement with three arguments: [[absolutive case|absolutive]], [[ergative case|ergative]], and [[indirect object]],<ref>Nichols, Johanna (1986)</ref> and there are also a wide range of [[applicative voice|applicative constructions]]. There is a split between "dynamic" and "stative" [[verb]]s, with dynamic verbs having an especially complex morphology. A verb's morphemes indicate the subject's and object's person, place, time, manner of action, negative, and other types of grammatical categories.

All Northwest Caucasian languages are [[left-branching language|left-branching]], so that the verb comes at the end of the sentence and modifiers such as [[relative clauses]] precede a noun.

Northwest Caucasian languages do not generally permit more than one finite verb in a sentence, which precludes the existence of [[subordinate clause]]s in the [[Indo-European languages|Indo-European]] sense. Equivalent functions are performed by extensive arrays of [[noun|nominal]] and [[participle|participial]] non-finite verb forms, though Abkhaz appears to be developing limited subordinate clauses, perhaps under the influence of Russian.