East Caucasian languages and some challenging features of their grammar
RSUH, Moscow
The East Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian) languages are the favorite subject of the field studies of many Moscow linguists. This tradition goes back to the collective field trips organized and directed by A.E. Kibrik. The East Caucasian language family provides a whole number of unknown and unusual phenomena to study. First, the family contains many languages: Daghestan is known as a country where each village has a language or at least a dialect of its own. The languages of the East Caucasian family are relatively well preserved: the processes of language shift or language death have not gone as far as in most regions of Russian Federation. Many grammatical features of the East Caucasian languages are highly unusual for a person that would look at them from Eurocentrist positions. They show ergative case marking, interesting patterns of gender agreement, branched systems of both nominal and verbal forms, numerous deverbal derivatives. Dependent predications are usually headed by non-finite verb forms and show many typologically rare features like backward control or non-local gender agreement.
This course will start from a short overview of the East Caucasian languages, their basic typological and sociolinguistic features. Then we shall discuss in more detail some grammatical features that are typologically rare or even unique and, hence, create serious problems for theoretical linguistics. This will include a discussion of gender and person agreement, some aspects of information structure encoding, the properties of reflexive pronouns and other anaphoric devices, some types of complex sentences (reported speech, relative constructions). In most cases, we shall discuss possible theoretical approaches to the phenomena in question.
We shall use the data of different East Caucasian languages with some special emphasis on Dargwa (Dargi) – a language or, rather, a language group that I have extensively studied in the field.
The course will also include some assignments for the students.