Online course on East Caucasian languages

The East Caucasian languages form a rather large and diverse family of languages that are spoken predominantly in the North Caucasian republics of Ingushetia, Chechnya, and Dagestan. Together these republics make up a territory of about 70.000 km2, a significant part of which is covered in mountainous terrain. In this lecture we take a look at the geographical distribution of the East Caucasian languages (and some of their neighbors): the location, size and population dynamics of the speech communities, and how they relate to the landscape. We will also discuss different approaches to classifying East Caucasian idioms. The question of whether something is a language or a dialect has been especially controversial in this region. Official decisions on language status have had far-reaching consequences for speakers' self-identification, attitudes towards their native language, and demographic data.

A striking feature of most languages of the Caucasus is the presence of inflectional optatives - dedicated forms that express the speaker's wish. The spread of inflectional optatives is matched by the prominence of  blessings and curses in the rituals of daily communication in Daghestanian villages. In this talk, I give an overview of optatives in East Caucasian languages and discuss their possible diachronic sources and grammaticalization paths. I consider typical situations where blessings and curses are used, and compare wish formulae across different East Caucasian languages. I argue for language contact as the channel of the areal spread of this category and suggest their prominent role in everyday discourse as its possible motivation.

Nominal paradigms across the East Caucasian family largely share a characteristic structure: it involves a clear morphological opposition between the absolutive case forms and the 'oblique' forms which make up the remainder of the paradigm, the latter employing distinctive oblique stem-forming markers. However, against the backdrop of this basic similarity in layout, there is still room for substantial differences in morphological behaviour between one language and another, as well as between lexemes within a given language. In this lecture I present the various abstract paradigm shapes that can be found in East Caucasian; the great diversity in the number of oblique stem formatives available and what can determine their selection; and a range of deviations from the family norm. I also look at the use of nominal stem formation to make case marking available to lexemes and larger structures which are not inherently nominal.

Directionality is a grammatical category specifying non-static relations between the Figure and the Ground, such as the Figure’s motion towards a Goal or from a Source or via a Path, where Goal, Source and Path are spatial areas defined with respect to the Ground, as in He went through(Path) under(Sub) the bridge. In many languages the expression of motion shows complex patterns of cumulation with the expression of the spatial configuration in function words, as is the case of the Russian preposition s ‘from the top of’. In a typical East Caucasian language, on the other hand, directionality (traditional категория ориентации or simply падеж), may be more or less consistently expressed by a set of morphemes separate from and following the markers expressing spatial configuration in the nominal inflectional paradigm. The presence of an additional slot dedicated to directionality is a signature property of the nominal morphological template of East Caucasian languages. In this talk, three topics related to directionality will be covered, some general and some rather specific: (a) a classification of East Caucasian spatial systems based on the available values of the category of directionality into tripartite systems, distinguishing at least Place, Goal and Source, and bipartite systems, merging Place and Goal in one marking; (b) decrease in boundedness of directionality markers as compared to spatial categories; and (c), based on the above, a possible interpretation of the spatial systems found in Dargwa languages, where Place is distinguished from  Goal by the presence of gender agreement.

In our talk, we will give an overview of East Caucasian postpositions from a typological perspective. The overview will cover the diachronic origin of postpositions as well as their morphological and case government properties.

Many East Caucasian postpositions are known to exhibit adverbial properties, for example, most of them can be used without nominal dependents. The lecture will address the issue of how to distinguish between postpositions and adverbs using formal tests. 

At the end of the lecture we will introduce the postpositional system of a specific language (Kina Rutul < Lezgic) for participants to get a taste of how an East Caucasian language works in this domain.

Since the XIXth century, the East Caucasian language family has been a testing ground for various theoretical approaches to ergativity. Most East Caucasian languages show consistent Absolutive vs. Ergative orientation in case marking and gender/number agreement of the verb. However, there are recurrent deviations like 1) case neutrality of 1st and 2nd person pronouns; 2) the biabsolutive cleft construction; 3) complex intransitive verbs with Ergative marking; 4) neutral or subject orientation of anaphora, converbs, etc., and more rare deviations like the person/number agreement in Lak, Dargwa or Tabassaran, or the accusative case in Udi. The idea of the role orientation, i.e. lack of the subject vs. object asymmetry, meets with difficulties. Two distinctions seem most prominent: one between the privileged group – Absolutive, Ergative Agent and (Dative) Experiencer and non-core arguments, and another between Absolutive and the nominals marked with the oblique cases.

This lecture discusses the expression of person in the Nakh-Dagestanian languages. It is mainly confined to the person marking within the verb.

In the Nakh-Dagestanian family, verbal person marking is often believed to be a rare and relatively new feature. It is found in less than ten languages of the family. However, within this relatively small set of languages, person is unexpectedly heterogeneous: there is a remarkable variation in the number and structure of personal oppositions, in the morphology of person markers, in the rules of person agreement control. More than that, in some languages, person markers seem to have non-standard diachronic source(s), different from personal and demonstrative pronouns.

The lecture contains a survey of person marking features in the few Nakh-Dagestanian languages where verbal person is attested. I will also try to show that there is a correlation between the formal features of person marking and their diachronic source. Finally, I will discuss the problem of person hierarchies with respect to verbal person in the Nakh-Dagestanian language family.

This lecture will present and analyze the category of noun class in Nakh-Dagestanian languages. We will discuss the principles that determine the division of nouns into classes and will explore agreement in noun class as a syntactic operation.