Publications

This paper surveys relative clause constructions in West Circassian (Adyghe) and Kabardian.

This paper presents a description of evidentiality marking in the Rikvani dialect of Andi. As a language spoken in the Caucasus, Andi is situated in the centre of a large area within Eurasia where evidentiality is frequently expressed with a perfect or resultative form of the verb (general indirective), and special particles marking hearsay (and sometimes also inference). Both are attested in Andi and form independent evidential paradigms. I will explore the way these forms are used in natural texts and elicitation and how they interact with each other. An important issue is to what extent evidentiality can be considered grammaticalized as part of the verbal paradigm in Andi. I will compare my observations on Andi to the systems found in other East Caucasian languages.

The paper traces the level of bilingualism in several highland villages of Daghestan (Northeast Caucasus) through the 20th century. We show that historically, men were more multilingual than women, but this was not true to the same extent for all languages. Highlanders’ repertoires suggest a correlation between the social function of the second language and the degree to which its command was gendered. We also explore the dynamics of multilingualism from the generation born at the end of the 19th century to the generation born in the 1990s. We show that during the 20th century local L2s were gradually displaced by Russian, and Daghestanian multilingualism lost its gendered character. We argue that these changes were caused by the introduction of Soviet schooling.

This paper describes the semantic and morphosyntactic properties of general converb constructions in Andi, a language of the Avar-Andic group of the East Caucasian language family. There are two general converbs in Andi, both of which are homophonous with a finite verb form (the aorist and the perfect, respectively). Each converb has a particular contextual meaning (manner and cause for the perfect converb, and means in the case of the aorist converb), while both can be used interchangeably to indicate the first stage of a complex event. The two constructions seem to be diachronically related, the aorist converbial construction being secondary and morphosyntactically more constrained. The aim of this paper is to describe and compare these two partially competing constructions in view of how similar forms are used in closely related languages.

The paper focuses on a two aspectual morphemes in Moksha Mordvin (< Mordvin < Finno-Ugric). The first of them, the Frequentative, has four phonologically conditioned allomorphs, -ənd-, -n’ə-, -s’ə-, and -kšn’ə-. These affixes used to be sepa-rate morphemes in Proto-Finno-Ugric, but ended up as having the same meaning and being complementarily distributed. A remnant of a more archaic stage of lan-guage evolution is the Avertive marker, -əkšn’ə-, only different from one of the Fre-quentative allomorphs by one phoneme, which can hardly be a coincidence. A dia-chronic hypothesis about how iterative-avertive polyfunctionality could have arisen is suggested.

This paper describes the range of patterns used for the expression of ‘other’ in East Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian) languages, an indigenous language family of the Eastern Caucasus mainly spoken in the Republics of Daghestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia (Russian Federation), as well as in northern regions of Azerbaijan and eastern parts of Georgia.

This chapter presents an overview of the Northwest Caucasian (West Caucasian, Abkhaz-Adyghe) family.

In polysynthetic West Caucasian languages, the morphological verbal complex amounts to a clause, with all kinds of participants cross-referenced by affixes. Relativization is performed by introducing a relative affix in the cross-reference slot which corresponds to the relativized participant. However, these languages display several cross-linguistically rare features of relativization. Firstly, while under the view of the verbal complex as a clause this affix appears to be a relative pronoun, it is an unusual relative pronoun because it remains in situ. Secondly, relative affixes may appear several times in the same clause. Thirdly, relative pronouns are not expected to occur in languages with prenominal relative clauses. Fourthly, in the Circassian branch, relative pronouns are identical to reflexive pronouns. These features are explained by considering relative prefixes to be resumptive pronouns. This interpretation finds a parallel in the neighboring East Caucasian languages, where reflexive pronouns also show resumptive usages. Finally, since in some West Caucasian languages the relative affix is a morpheme with a dedicated relative function but still shows properties of a resumptive pronoun, our data suggest that the distinction between relative pronouns and resumptive pronouns may not be so clear as is usually assumed.

The article deals with different aspects of language interaction in agroup of neighboring languages in the Akhvakh district of Daghestan, in particular Karata, Tukita, Tad-Magitl’ and Tlibisho (this zone later referred to as Karata cluster). The villages of the Karata cluster are all located within a short walk-ing distanceof 30–120 min from each other, in all four villages different languages are spoken: Karata, Tukita, Akhvakh and Bagvalal respectively.Qualitative and quantitative data was collected during a fieldtrip in March 2018 as part of a long-term project focussing on neighbor multilingualism in highland Daghestan. The research employed the method of retrospective family interviews. Respondents were interviewed about their language reper-toire and the repertoire of their close relatives that they remembered, which enabled the researchers to conclude which languages were used in the interaction between neighboring villages before the Russi-fication and which languages are used today.We found out that interaction between neighboring villages employed and still employs Avar, that is, the lingua franca model is the common strategy in the Karata cluster. Today more than 90% of the popu-lation of the four villages concerned have command of Avar, which is different from many other areas of highland Daghestan. In other parts of Daghestan the most common model for neighbor interaction was the use of a language of one of the neighbors (asymmetrical bilingualism). Symmetrical bilingualism (when both sides have command of each other’s languages) and lingua franca were less common.Whereas the level of Avar language is high, the level of active multilingualism in the languages of Karata cluster remains low. Passive knowledge of the neighboring languages is more wide-spread. We also found out that passive knowledge is asymmetrical forseveral reasons, which are discussed in the article. A suggestion is put forward that the level of understanding of neighboring languages is not only dependent on the genetic affinity of the languages but also on the direction of socio-economic contact.Similar to other regions of Daghestan, the command of Russian has grown in Karata, however, unlike in many other places, Avar as a lingua franca has not yet been displaced by Russian.

The article focuses on Russian constructions that are similar to English raising constructions. In these structures, there is an element that only has an interpretation if they are generated and assigned a semantic role in the embedded clause. Here belong some of constructions with dative NPs and predicatives; some modal constructions; some semi-auxiliaries, and so on. Although I use assumptions made by Minor (2013), Kholodilova (2015), and Burukina  (2016, 2017), I verify their claims by using indefinite pronouns and NPIs on "ni-" that require a licensing head. I claim that Russian raising-like structures differ from English ones, especially because in Russian, raising cannot create structures that would otherwise be ungrammatical - in a sense, raising structures emerge, where control structures are possible and use the same language material as control structures.

The present study investigates word-order realizations in spoken Russian by bilingual speakers whose first languages are among the autochthonous languages of Russia, namely Daghestanian (Nakh-Daghestanian and Turkic), Siberian (Northern Samoyedic), and Far Eastern (Southern Tungusic) languages. In particular, we focus on the order of head and modifier in genitive constructions realized in spoken Russian by such bilinguals. Whereas in Standard Russian the neutral word order in genitive constructions is N + GEN, the varieties of Russian spoken in Daghestan, Siberia and the Far East often show the opposite order in such constructions, i. e., GEN + N. With the present corpus-based investigation, we aim at determining whether such variations in word order are to be interpreted as the result of syntactic calquing from 106 the speakers’ first languages (all showing GEN + N as the neutral word order in genitive constructions), or rather as a general feature of spoken Russian. To answer this question, we compare the results of the analysis of genitive constructions carried out on corpora of Russian spoken in Daghestan, Siberia and the Far East, as well as on the corpus of spoken Standard Russian of the RNC (Russian National Corpus). To understand what factors could determine the choice of a specific word order, we have analyzed our data not only based on the position of the genitive in such constructions, but also with respect to the semantics of the relation between the head noun and the genitive, the status of the genitive along the animacy scale, and the “weight” of the genitive modifier (i.e., one word vs. two or more words).

The Russian Constructicon project currently prioritizes multi-word constructions that are not represented in dictionaries and that are especially useful for learners of Russian. The immediate goal is to identify constructions and determine the semantic constraints on their slots. The Russian Constructicon is being built in parallel with the Swedish Constructicon and will ultimately model the entire Russian language in terms of constructions at all levels from morpheme to discourse. The contents of the Russian Constructicon will serve learners of the language, linguists researching both language-internal and typological phenomena, and will also serve language technology applications such as spell checkers and automated readability assessment tools.

A data analysis tool of the Corpus of Russian Poetry (a part of the Russian National Corpus) is designed for quantitative research in various areas of versology and linguistics aspects of poetic texts. The core part, a statistic database of the corpus, includes annotation at the level of texts, verses, words as well as patterns of words, letters and stress. The tool allows a user to study certain properties (e. g. rhyming patterns, lexical co-occurrence) taken alone and in their interaction, both in the whole corpus and in subcorpora. Besides that, it facilitates contrastive studies of two chosen subcorpora and a few case studies demonstrating applicable methods and potential for further research in the field of the Digital literary studies.

Ingush (Nakh-Daghestanian, Caucasus) offers a variety of contexts with contrast, variation, or speaker choice between agreement and non-agreement and between overt and null arguments, which provide speakers many opportunities to manipulate agreement and argument marking. Ingush discourse is therefore a good test case for the plausible hypothesis that agreement and overt arguments are in complementary distribution. I survey referential density in a corpus of about 5000 words and find no evidence of either straightforward complementarity or expected incidental effects of such complementarity, and some evidence going against it. Some additional, orthogonal distributions were evident, showing that the corpus is large enough to reveal discourse effects if they were present. Ingush agreement is in gender, not person, and there is an arbitrary and strictly lexical bifurcation of verbs into those that do and those that do not have gender agreement; these typological points raise comparative and theoretical issues of interest.

The poetic texts pose a challenge to full morphological tagging and lemmatization since the authors seek to extend the vocabulary, employ morphologically and semantically deficient forms, go beyond standard syntactic templates, use non-projective constructions and non-standard word order, among other techniques of the creative language game. In this paper we evaluate a number of probabilistic taggers based on decision trees, CRF and neural network algorithms as well as one state-of-the-art dictionary-based tagger. The taggers were trained on prosaic texts and tested on three poetic samples of different complexity. Firstly, we discuss the method to compile the gold standard datasets for the Russian poetry. Secondly, we evaluate the taggers’ performance in the identification of the part of speech tags and lemmas. Finally, we analyze different types of errors in the taggers’ output. We analyse the confusion matrix of the parts of speech and mismatches in lemma annotation.

This paper concerns the converb forms expressing Simultaneity in Izhma Komi, Northern  Khanty and Moksha belonging to the Finno-Ugric group of languages. The existing typological classifications of temporal relations and simultaneity relations in particular either are not detailed enough or lack rigorous criteria and thus appear not to be sufficient for understanding the usage and the distribution of temporal converbs. The study attempts to build a more detailed typological classification of Simultaneity relations which accounts for the data of the languages under consideration. The analyzed parameters of variation include the viewpoint aspect of the events, clause modification type, givenness of the conveyed information and the pragmatic type of the predicate. Special attention is paid to the discourse-pragmatic properties of the forms which bring new insights into the discussion.

The morphology of aspect in many East Caucasian languages is usually described in terms of two aspectual stems. One stem, called ‘perfective’, derives perfective forms, including perfective past (i.e. aorist), perfective converb, perfective participle and other forms. The other stem, called ‘imperfective’, derives imperfective forms, including e.g. imperfective past (i.e. imperfect) and imperfective present, imperfective converb, imperfective participle and some others. Some of the imperfective- vs. perfective-based forms may be formally identical in terms of inflection (e.g. aorist and imperfect may be produced by the same suffix), but this is a matter of variation. In addition to the forms with clear aspectual semantics (e.g. aorist vs. imperfect), there is a number of forms that are not obvious in their aspectual quality. Thus, the prohibitive, expressed morphologically, is consistently derived from the imperfective stem. Imperative and infinitive, on the other hand, may be derived from both stems, thus distinguishing between perfective and imperfective, as in Dargwa (including Mehweb), or from separate secondary stems, as in Archi.

The parallels between East Caucasian languages are not absolute. The study of intra-family variation may focus on two different issues – the distribution of the forms lacking a clear aspectual meaning between the two stems (e.g. where do the prohibitive and the imperative or various types of special converbs go) or on the formal correlation between the perfective and the imperfective stem. It is the latter issue that I consider below. I study the mutual relation between the two stems, the ways in which they are formally different, and whether and to what extent one of them may be considered the primary one and the other derived. I will address this issue in three languages belonging to three different branches of the family: Archi (Lezgic), Mehweb (Dargwa) and Khinalug (Khinalug). My main conclusion is that, notwithstanding a plethora of patterns that differs across and within languages, the general tendency is that the imperfective stem is, in various ways, the marked member of the opposition, either straightforwardly derived from the perfective stem (Khinalug) or being structurally marked in the sense of Croft (2002).

I use the same parameters to arrive at conclusions comparable across the three languages, including:

 

formal asymmetry of the two sets of inflectional forms: if the two sets include comparable functional categories (past, general converb, participle, action nominal), are they produced by the same affixes?

 

(un)markedness of one of the stems in paradigmatic terms (structural markedness): whether one of the stems shows more irregularities and formal diversity, including especially expression of noun class agreement

 

relative morphological primacy of the two stems (morphological markedness): whether one of the stems may be shown to derive from the other;

 

The languages considered in the paper show different degrees of such asymmetry, from clearly asymmetrical Archi through Mehweb whose system seems to be perfectly symmetrical but where the imperfective stem is somewhat more marked to Khinalug where the imperfective stem is almost unequivocally derived from the perfective stem. The data comes from descriptions, including (Kibrik 1977) (also the dictionary (Chumakina et al. 2008) for Archi; (Kibrik et al. 1972) for Khinalug, and (Magometov 1982, Daniel in preparation) for Mehweb.

Sections 2, 3 and 4 treat Archi, Mehweb and Khinalug, respectively. Section 5 is a comparison of the three languages across the relevant parameters. Section 6 is a summary of the results.