Authors:Babaliyeva; Ayten Abstract: 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. PubDate: Wed, 20 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Schrijver; Peter Abstract: 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... PubDate: Fri, 6 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000
Authors:Kaye; Steven Abstract: 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. PubDate: Fri, 6 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000
Authors:Verhees; Samira Abstract: 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... PubDate: Tue, 7 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000
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