Anna Panova, Yury Lander (HSE University) Competing coordinating constructions in the languages of the North Caucasus

In this talk we discuss systems displaying several (two to three) constructions for nominal coordination in eleven languages of the North Caucasus. Our sample includes representatives of West Caucasian, East Caucasian, Indo-European and Turkic languages. The data come both from corpora and from elicitation.We tentatively propose a syntactic prototype of nominal coordination based on the collective contexts and certain other formal properties. We suggest that the variation observed among the systems discussed in the talk results from competition between coordinate constructions covering contexts closer to this prototype and additive constructions extending from less prototypical contexts.