Recent languagesofcaucasus items

Standard Tabasaran: short grammar sketch

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is a sketch grammar of Tabasaran (Glottolog code taba1259), a language of the Lezgic branch of the East Caucasian or Nakh-Daghestanian language family spoken in the Republic of Dagestan, Russian Federation. Tabasaran exhibits a complex morphology, characterized by the retention of archaic features such as preverbs, prefixed and infixed negation and gender/number agreement. At the same time, the language shows curious innovations, including the development of personal agreement, the marking of verbal aspect through preverbation and dialectal variations in tense and mood categories. Tabasaran is known for its rich nominal inflection comprising 46 cases, with 42 of them being spatial or adverbial. This paper covers all areas of grammar and is informed by modern typology. It is based on published descriptions, my own fieldwork, and corpus work collected in Dagestan in the years 2010, 2014 and 2015.

A history of the vowel systems of the Nakh languages (East Caucasian), with special reference to umlaut in Chechen and Ingush

Fri, 6 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Chechen, Ingush and Batsbi together form the Nakh subgroup of the East Caucasian language family. Chechen and Ingush, and to a lesser degree Batsbi, underwent regressive vowel assimilation (umlaut). The sound laws that govern umlaut have already been established to some degree. The article focuses on two issues: umlaut rules for the Chechen dialects are worked out in detail on the basis of the Chechen dialectal material provided by Imnajshvili 1977, and the different umlaut effects caused by the mid vowels *e and *o on the one hand and the close vowels *i and *u on the other are highlighted, for both Chechen and Ingush. The conclusions are applied to the reconstruction of the verbal endings of the present tense, Proto-Nakh *‑u, *-o, *-i and *-e, and the endings of the recent past tense, Proto-Nax *-iᶰ and *-eᶰ. Building on work by Handel 2003, the many different inflectional classes of the Chechen and Ingush...

"A museum of ethnology and philology": rediscovering an early work of Caucasian linguistics

Fri, 6 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Cyril Graham’s The Avar Language, a treatise consisting of a linguistic description and an extensive English-Avar wordlist, originally appeared in the late nineteenth century in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and has been republished in the early twenty-first century in book form, with Russian translation and commentary by Boris Ataev of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Makhachkala. Welcoming Ataev’s contribution in making it accessible to the modern Russophone audience, I discuss the linguistic qualities and shortcomings of Graham’s article as well as the complex and revealing history of its composition. Engagingly written and in some respects perceptive, while in other respects outmoded even in its own time, it provides an insight into the early development of Caucasian linguistic study in the West.

Evidentiality in East Caucasian on the map

Tue, 7 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Languages spoken in contiguous areas tend to have similar systems of evidentiality marking. The Caucasus is part of a large area where systems centered on marking events as not witnessed by the speaker are widespread among genealogically unrelated languages. It is often suggested that Turkic languages could be the source of diffusion in this case, because evidentiality is an old and prominent feature of Turkic grammar. This paper explores the areal dimension of evidentiality in languages of the East Caucasian family, which are spoken on a relatively compact territory in the eastern Caucasus. It provides an overview of the most common types of marking and their geographical distribution among the East Caucasian languages and their Turkic neighbors. The spread of evidentiality as part of the tense system shows a peculiar pattern in the eastern Caucasus, which suggests that it could be a contact-induced feature. However, a number of factors prevent the reconstruction of a specific...

Atlas of multilingualism in Daghestan: A case study in diachronic sociolinguistics

Sat, 22 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This paper introduces the future Atlas of Multilingualism in Daghestan, a project based on extensive field study of the language repertoires of the residents of rural highland Daghestan. The Atlas will provide quantitative data on multilingualism across a relatively compact linguistic area, which is, culturally and socially, both homogeneous and diverse. It will represent a wide range of ethnic contact situations in a qualitatively and quantitatively comparable way. The data are collected by the method of retrospective family interviews, which is designed to obtain data about bilingualism in the past. The paper gives a brief sociolinguistic overview of Daghestan, describes the method and its restrictions, explains the design of the future Atlas, and provides two sample chapters. One of the chapters describes three villages in northeast Daghestan, and the other describes two villages in southern Daghestan.

On modality in Georgian sign language (GESL)

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Modality is one of the most fascinating and complex areas of language studies. This paper illustrates the types of modal constructions in Georgian Sign language (GESL), including negative forms. GESL shows modality semantics with a combination of manual and facial signs. Modals in GESL can occur in the pre-verbal, clause-final, or clause-initial positions, as in many other sign languages (SLs). GESL modal constructions show the specific tense-related negation strategy. Modal constructions in this language often use combinations of modal signs with an equal value.

Evidential coding in Lezgi

Tue, 25 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Evidentiality is “grammatical marking of how we know something” (Aikhenvald 2014:3). As evidentiality is a well-known feature in many Nakh-Daghestanian languages, this paper investigates the expression of evidential meanings in Lezgi, a language which has received less attention in this area. This paper compares evidential meanings of verb forms with the existing findings in a related language, Aghul (Majsak & Merdanova 2002a), and then considers other ways of conveying evidential meanings non-lexically. The language data were collected through elicitation and study of natural texts. Following Aikhenvald (2004), semantic labels were established for different evidential meanings.

Regarding indirect evidentiality, the Lezgi Perfect was found to display the meaning of inference, thus largely coinciding with the inferential use of the Aghul Resultative. In addition, a verb construction involving a nominalized predicative and an equative particle conveys...

Univerbation via liaison and the evolution of lexicon and grammar in Northern Akhvakh

Fri, 23 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Chechen it-cleft construction

Fri, 1 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This paper presents a biclausal construction in Chechen, arguing that it can be analyzed as an it-cleft. The construction consists of a main copula clause with a covert or pronominal subject, and a temporal complement that co-indexes with an adjunct position in a relative clause that does not form a constituent with the subject or the complement. A study of the construction in a corpus of newspaper and journal texts shows characteristics that make it stand out in terms of syntax and function: the cleft clause can appear both clause-finally as well as clause-initially, and its function is limited to text-structuring (it is mostly used to mark the start of a text or the transition to a new paragraph). This latter characteristic is exceptional: it-clefts in other languages (such as English and Norwegian) are known to be used for text-structuring to some extent, but Chechen is the first language known to only use it for this purpose. This prompts the question...

Embedded finite complements, indexical shift, and binding in Tsez

Thu, 12 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This report documents grammatical patterns associated with Tsez finite clauses that combine with the quotative enclitic =ƛin. Based on the distributional properties of such finite clauses and their co-occurrence with different matrix verbs, I suggest that the marker =ƛin is structurally ambiguous between a genuine quotative marker, marking direct speech, and a complementizer, heading finite clauses. In the former function, =ƛin can be compared to English like, go or all. The quotative =ƛin does not impose restrictions on the word order of the embedded clause and is compatible with a large set of verbs, including but not limited to verbs of speaking, cognition, and propositional attitude predicates. As a complementizer heading finite clauses, the marker =ƛin appears on clauses that are strictly predicate-final and attaches directly to that predicate. When selected by propositional attitude verbs, the finite complement...

Embedded questions and sluicing in Georgian and Svan

Thu, 12 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Georgian and Svan exhibit a construction similar to classical sluicing: that is, translational analogs are grammatical of sentences like ‘Mary cooked something, but I don’t know what’. I provide a description of these phenomena and show that this construction in both languages satisfies standard tests for sluicing. I show that wh-movement in Georgian targets a lower position than in, say, English, namely, Spec FocP. Accordingly, I argue that the account developed in Toosarvandani (2008) for Persian and Van Craenenbroeck & Lipták (2006, 2013) for Hungarian is applicable in this case as well. Specifically, sluicing-like constructions in Georgian are derived by movement of wh-phrases into this position and subsequent deletion of the complement of the FocP. The syntax of the Svan counterpart of this construction differs in some crucial aspects and its analysis is yet to be obtained.