Conjunction particles in Nakh-Daghestanian: topic, focus or something else?

Nakh-Daghestanian (Caucasus, Russia) languages make heavily use of conjunction particles. In this talk, I focus on two languages from different subbranches, Hinuq (particle = n(o)) and Sanzhi Dargi (= ra). The data comes from natural texts collected by myself

Person marking and information structure in Nakh-Daghestanian

[Extract] What is the function of person indexing? - reduplicating 'redundant' information - reference tracking in discourse - highlighting the grammatically privileged participant Characterization of person indexing: - trigger of the person indexing - position of person indexing Person indexing in Nakh-Daghestanian: - Nakh-Daghestanian (or East Caucasian or North-East Caucasian) languages are spoken in Northern part of the Caucasus (Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia) - salient grammatical feature: gender/number agreement on verbs, partially on adjectives, adverbs - person indexing is not very frequent in Nakh-Daghestanian - overviews: Helmbrecht (1996), Schulze (2007a) - among the languages that have it are: Dargi, Lak, Tabasaran, Batsbi, Udi, and to a lesser extend Hunzib, Akhvakh and two Avar dialects - generally viewed as a relatively young category (in contrast to the pervasive and probably older gender/number indexing) - only one person is indexed (with the exception of Tabasaran) - indexing is regulated by various hierarchies - in Dargi, Lak, and Udi (Harris 2002: 44-63) person makers express term focus - focus (Dik et al. 1981) "what is relatively the most important or salient information in the given setting" - term focus (or constituent focus or argument focus): whenever the scope of focus is not on the predication as a whole, but on some part of it - two types of term focus: - completive (or presentational or information focus): the focus fills a gap in the pragmatic information of the addressee; new information (e.g. answers to WH-questions) - contrastive (or identificational): a reply to the addressee's contrary belief of information (e.g. correction by replacing, restricting or expanding), characterized by exhaustiveness (i.e. it implies that the predication holds only for the focused element out of a set of elements given in the context) (e.g. cleft constructions, prosodic prominence, focus particles

Elevation as a category of grammar: Sanzhi Dargwa and beyond

Nakh-Daghestanian languages have encountered growing interest from typologists and linguists from other subdiscplines, and more and more languages from the Nakh-Daghestanian language family are being studied. This paper provides a grammatical overview of the hitherto undescribed Sanzhi Dargwa language, followed by a detailed analysis of the grammaticalized expression of spatial elevation in Sanzhi. Spatial elevation, a topic that has not received substantial attention in Caucasian linguistics, manifests itself across different parts of speech in Sanzhi Dargwa and related languages. In Sanzhi, elevation is a deictic category in partial opposition with participant-oriented deixis/horizontally-oriented directional deixis. This paper treats the spatial uses of demonstratives, spatial preverbs and spatial cases that express elevation as well as the semantic extension of this spatial category into other, non-spatial domains. It further compares the Sanzhi data to other Caucasian and non-Caucasian languages and makes suggestions for investigating elevation as a subcategory within a broader category of topographical deixis

Complexity and Its Relation to Variation

This paper is concerned with the relationship between complexity and variation. The main goal is to lay out the conceptual foundations and to develop and systematize reasonable hypotheses such as to set out concrete research questions for future investigations. I first compare how complexity and variation have synchronically been studied and what kinds of questions have been asked in those studies. Departing from earlier surveys of different definitions of complexity, here I classify the majority of complexity studies into two broad types based on two ways of defining this concept. The first type determines and measures linguistic complexity by counting numbers of items (e.g., linguistic forms or rules and interactions between forms). The second type makes use of transparency and the principle of One-Meaning–One-Form. In addition, linguistic complexity has been defined by means of concepts from information theory, namely in terms of description length or information content, but those studies are in the minority. Then I define linguistic variation as a situation when two or more linguistic forms have identical or largely identical meaning and it is possible to use either the one or the other variant. Variation can be free or linguistically or socially conditioned. I argue that there is an implicational relationship between complexity of the first type that is defined in terms of numbers of items and variation. Variation is a type of complexity because it implies the existence of more than one linguistic form per meaning. But not every type of complexity involves variation because complexity defined on the basis of transparency does not necessarily imply the existence of more than one form. In the following I discuss extralinguistic factors that (possibly) have an impact on socially conditioned variation and/or complexity and can lead to an increase or decrease of complexity and/or variation. I conclude with suggestions of how to further examine the relationship between complexity and variation

A grammar of Sanzhi Dargwa

Sanzhi Dargwa belongs to the Dargwa (Dargi) languages (ISO dar; Glottocode sanz1248) which form a subgroup of the East Caucasian (Nakh-Dagestanian) language family. Sanzhi Dargwa is spoken by approximately 250 speakers and is severely endangered. This book is the first comprehensive descriptive grammar of Sanzhi, written from a typological perspective. It treats all major levels of grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax) and also information structure. Sanzhi Dargwa is structurally similar to other East Caucasian languages, in particular Dargwa languages. It has a relatively large consonant inventory including pharyngeal and ejective consonants. Sanzhi morphology is concatenative and mainly suffixing. The language exhibits a mixture of dependent-marking in the form of a rich case inventory and head-marking in the form of verbal agreement. Nouns are divided into three genders. Verbal inflection conflates tense/aspect/mood/evidentiality in a rich array of synthetic and analytic verb forms as well as participles, converbs, a masdar (verbal noun), and infinitive and some other forms used in analytic tenses and subordinate clauses. Salient traits of the grammar are two independently operating agreement systems: gender/number agreement and person agreement. Within the nominal domain, modifiers agree with the head nominal in gender/number. Agreement within the clausal domain is mainly controlled by the argument in the absolutive case. Person agreement operates only at the clausal level and according to the person hierarchy 1, 2 > 3. Sanzhi has ergative alignment in the form of gender/number agreement and ergative case marking. The most frequent word order at the clause level is SOV, though all other logically possible word orders are also attested. In subordinate clauses, word order is almost exclusively head-final

The Impact of Language on Resilience in Georgia's Minority Communities

This paper is intended as a contribution to discussions of the concept of resilience in linguistics, with a focus on minority language speakers in Georgia. For our study, representatives of three of Georgia’s largest minority groups - Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Chechens - have been interviewed. The sociolinguistic situations of the respective speech communities in Georgia only partially overlap, but all three ethnolinguistic communities maintain a strong cultural identity and they rarely engage in ethnically mixed relationships. The goal of the study is to give insights into the current language situation seen from the native speakers' viewpoint and to testify as to whether language attitude and knowledge can benefit the resilience of minorities in the majority community

Bridging constructions in Tsezic languages

This paper treats bridging constructions in the Tsezic languages (Bezhta, Hunzib, Khwarshi, Hinuq, and Tsez) of the Nakh-Daghestanian language family. We describe the syntactic and semantic properties of bridging constructions based on corpus data from all five Tsezic languages. Bridging constructions are defined as bipartite constructions that consist of a finite reference clause, which is followed by a non-main adverbial clause that functions as the bridging clause. The adverbial clause contains a variety of temporal converbs with general perfective converbs being more common than other types of temporal converbs. Reference and bridging clauses are both a target for additions, omissions, modifications and substitutions. Bridging constructions are primarily found in traditional oral narratives such as fairy tales where they index the genre and function as stylistic devices to express parallelism. Within the narratives they are often used to indicate episode changes and can be accompanied by switches of subject referents or locations

Microtypology and the Tsezic languages : A case study of syntactic properties of converbal clauses

This paper analyzes the syntactic properties of adverbial clauses in the Tsezic languages, a group of five to six languages from the Nakh-Daghestanian language family (Caucasus, Russia). These languages make heavily use of converbs and other non-finite verb forms in order to form complex sentences. The syntactic analysis presented builds on Bickel’s (2010) variables for the investigation of clause-linkage patterns and is based on data from natural texts. I mainly focus on coreference, scope properties, word order and extraction. Despite being closely related and syntactically rather similar, the Tsezic languages show some variation with respect to coreference and zeros in converbal clauses. This paper thus confirms the validity of microtypological studies and positions Tsezic converb constructions within a cross- linguistic typology of complex sentences

The Semantics of Verbal Categories in Nakh-Daghestanian Languages: tense, aspect, evidentiality, mood and modality

[Extract] This book explores the semantics of tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality in Nakh-Daghestanian (North-East Caucasian) languages. From a general point of view, these verbal categories and the conceptual relations between the four semantic domains are interesting for linguists from various theoretical and areal backgrounds as well as for researchers from other fields (philosophy of language, cognition, etc.). Virtually all sentences carry informaiton about tense, aspect, modality, and in many languages also evidentiality. Within individual languages, these domains are commonly formally and functionally interrelated. This raises questions about the categorization and the status of the forms and how we can deal with them when writing grammars of specific languages, expecially when there is no established research tradition for the languages in question

Alignment typology, reflexives, and reciprocals in Tsezic languages

Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Languages of the Caucasus (2013), pp. 32-5