Publications

Bachet’s game is a variant of the game of Nim. There are 𝑛 objects in one pile. Two players take turns to remove any positive number of objects not exceeding some fixed number 𝑚. The player who takes the last object loses. We consider a variant of Bachet’s game in which each move is a lottery over set {1, 2, . . . ,𝑚}. The outcome of a lottery is the number of objects that player takes from the pile. We show that under some nondegenericity assumptions on the set of available lotteries the probability that the first player wins in subgame perfect Nash equilibrium converges to 1/2 as 𝑛 tends to infinity.

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

Head/dependent marking is a typological parameter based on whether syntactic relations, or dependencies, are marked on the head of the relation, on the non-head, on both, on neither, or elsewhere in the constituent.  It has been visible in description and comparison for some thirty years, during which time advances in analysis of phrase structure and descriptions of previously unnoticed patterns have revealed some imprecisions and gaps in the typology.  That approach has figured in descriptive and theoretical work of various kinds and has proven quite useful as far as it goes, but the expansion of descriptive and theoretical work on morphosyntax in the subsequent decades has revealed some gaps and inconsistencies in the original formulation.  These can be removed by allowing markers to be assigned not to words but to entire phrases, a move that also allows detached and neutral marking to be more comfortably accommodated in locus theory.

Head/dependent marking is a typological parameter based on whether syntactic relations, or dependencies, are marked on the head of the relation, on the non-head, on both, on neither, or elsewhere in the constituent.  It has been visible in description and comparison for some thirty years, during which time advances in analysis of phrase structure and descriptions of previously unnoticed patterns have revealed some imprecisions and gaps in the typology.  That approach has figured in descriptive and theoretical work of various kinds and has proven quite useful as far as it goes, but the expansion of descriptive and theoretical work on morphosyntax in the subsequent decades has revealed some gaps and inconsistencies in the original formulation.  These can be removed by allowing markers to be assigned not to words but to entire phrases, a move that also allows detached and neutral marking to be more comfortably accommodated in locus theory.

Northwest Caucasian languages display a high degree of polysynthesis (manifested in complex words which bear much information on arguments and the characteristics of a situation), prefixes and suffixes, with some morphemes being capable to appear both as prefixes and suffixes, ergative-based cross-reference of core arguments and indirect objects introduced by applicatives, highly developed means of expressing locational semantics within the predicate, and intricate tense-modality-aspect systems. Although classical noun-to-verb incorporation does not occur, there are constructions akin to incorporation, especially in the nominal domain. Nouns constitute a subclass of a broad class of predicates (both morphologically and syntactically) and form word-like nominal complexes with their attributes. Morphemes demonstrate features which are not typical of morphemes in Standard Average European languages, including much autonomy reflected in affix order variation and ability to attach to complex syntactic constituents.

This article presents a survey of the morphology of highly polysynthetic Northwest Caucasian languages.

This note presents two challenges for the analysis of promise-type verbs within the Movement Theory of Control. We show that the objects of these verbs in Russian are not prepositional and are incorrectly predicted to be legitimate controllers. We also argue against analysing oblique control as movement.

The volume is devoted to the typology of the category of number in the world's languages.

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 paper gives an account of participial clauses in Agul (Lezgic, Nakh-Daghestanian), based on a sample of 858 headed noun-modifying clauses taken from two text corpora, one spoken and one written. Noun-modifying clauses in Agul do not show syntactic restrictions on what can be relativized, and hence they instantiate the type known as GNMCCs, or general noun-modifying clause constructions. As the text counts show, intransitive verbs are more frequent than transitives and experiencer verbs in participial clauses, and among intransitive verbs, locative statives with the roots ‘be’ and ‘stay, remain’ account for half of all the uses. The asymmetry between the different relativization targets is also significant. Among the core arguments, the intransitive subject (S) is the most frequent target, patient (P) occupies second place, and agent (A) is comparatively rare. The preference of S and, in general, of S and P over A also holds true for most other Nakh-Daghestanian languages for which comparable counts are available. At the same time, Agul stands apart from the other languages by its high ratio of non-core relativization which accounts for 42% of all participial clauses. Addressee, arguments and adjuncts encoded with a locative case, as well as more general PLACE and TIME relativizations show especially high frequency, outnumbering such arguments as experiencers, recipients, and predicative and adnominal possessors. Possible reasons for the high ratio of non-argument relativization are discussed in the paper.

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

This paper describes some aspects of the West Circassian Corpus, an electronic resource containing annotated texts in West Circassian (Adyghe). We focus on some ways in which the corpus can serve as an important instrument for teaching West Circassian. In particular, it is shown that the West Circassian Corpus can be used for compiling the exercises, for checking the actual use of the language as well as for organizing small-scale research projects devoted to the functioning of West Circassian. The paper contains some examples of the use of the West Circassian Corpus for teaching purposes.

Kabardian (Northwest Caucasian) displays two associative plural constructions. The first pattern exploits the suffix which is also used for the expression of additive plural: it is added to proper names and normally provides a reference to the family of the focal referent. Within the second pattern, a specific associative plural marker follows a syntactically autonomous nominal. The latter pattern possesses several specific properties: the associative plural marker governs the case of the focal nominal, which can be represented even by inanimate, non-specific and coordinate NPs. To describe the Kabardian associative plural system, we would suggest using not only a simplified version of Animacy Hierarchy (as is often done in typological literature) but involving several other hierarchies including those of definiteness/referentiality, number individuation, and morphosyntactic autonomy.

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 a 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 suggest a method to compile the gold standard datasets for the Russian poetry. Secondly, we focus on the taggers’ performance in the identification of the part of speech tags and lemmas. We reveal what kind of POS classes, paradigm classes and syntactic patterns mostly affect the quality of processing.

The paper compares two rival word-formation constructions giving rise to compound agent nouns in Russian, i.e., (para)synthetic compounds formed with the agentive suffixes -ec and -tel’, such as basnopisec ‘fable writer’ and bytopisatel’ ‘everyday-life writer’. To understand what makes these constructions different from one another, compounds in -ec and -tel’ are analyzed based on a number of formal and semantic criteria, i.e., the part of speech and semantic role of the non-verbal element of the compound, the transitivity and formal aspect of the verbal base of the compound, the animacy of the compound’s referent, and the semantics of the compound. The study is supported by statistical analyses, i.e., conditional inference trees and random forests, which help discriminate the behavior of rival constructions and determine which parameters are more relevant for the comparison. To understand whether diachronic and/or stylistic factors also affect the survival of rival constructions, the data are checked in the Russian National Corpus, which allows retrieving information about the texts in which compounds occur, such as their creation date and textual genre. Finally, the productivity of rival word-formation constructions in modern Russian is discussed both in terms of diachronic changes and in terms of restrictions that the two constructions are subject to. The analyses carried out demonstrate that the two constructions show significant differences regarding their semantics, but also their diachronic and stylistic distribution, as well as their productivity, which prevents one construction from completely ousting the other in modern Russian.

This paper discusses novel facts regarding adpositional agreement in Avar in light of recent theories of feature valuation. I show that the traditional notion of downward Agree/upward valuation is sufficient to account for the observed facts, rendering the competing mechanism of upward Agree/downward valuation superfluous.