Laboratory seminars

The DagLoans project aims at investigating lexical convergence between East Caucasian languages and their neighbours in quantitative terms. We focus on horizontal interaction, looking at borrowings between languages that are in direct contact and dismissing influence of dominant cultures and distant languages, e.g. Arabic, Persian or Russian. The project consists of two parts - one dealing with lexical matter copy, the other with lexical pattern copy. Today we are only discussing the data of the former.

We deal with lexical matter borrowing in an attempt to compare and quantify horizontal borrowing between languages at different locations. Instead of comparing standard languages, we aim at comparing local varieties and, ideally, village lects. Basing on the Leipzig-Jakarta list and issues of "Отраслевая лексика", we attempt to compose a list of lexical items with a high borrowability rate. The list should be concise enough to be elicited from several speakers during a one day visit to a village, but, on the other hand, long enough to discriminate local varieties and, ideally, village lects.

At present, we work on data from Rutul, Tsunta and Botlikh districts. In the talk on September, 19 we plan to discuss the list and its composition and elicitation techniques we use to decide whether it is an adequate tool  for studying lexical contact rate at local level and how it reflects local geography and data on bilingualism. The talk is based on the data from 6 villages (4 languages) of the Rutul region that are located in the same valley: Khlut (Lezgian), Kiche (Rutul), Rutul (Rutul), Kina (Rutul), Helmets (Tsakhur), and Kusur (Avar).

Rich consonantal inventories are a salient feature of the languages of the Caucasus on the whole and of the languages of Daghestan in particular. Their composition is a subject to a certain variation from language to language, but is overall similar. All languages have ejectives, most languages have labialization, and geminates are not uncommon. On the other hand, acoustic properties of the phonologically identical elements may be substantially different. To document these differences, in the last few years we do systematic field recordings of data from different languages. In this talk we will introduce the aims and methods of the project and will present preliminary results of our analysis of acoustic properties of ejectives as compared to corresponding voiceless stops. We will evaluate the impact of such parameters as closure duration and voice onset time. We will use the data from three different languages - Rutul (Kina dialect), Andi (Zilo dialect) and Mehweb. In the long run, we hope that our project will be able to address the following theoretical question: is the observed intragenetic variation more sensitive to areal or to systemic factors?

The Universal Dependencies (UD) is a project dealing with consistent cross-linguistic morphological and syntactic mark-up. The UD is currently in version 2 and covers 52 languages with 10 more languages yet to be included.

With its own annotation principles and abstract inventory for parts of speech, morphosyntactic features and dependency relations, UD aims to facilitate multilingual parser development, crosslingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. While UD covers 11 language families, it does not include any languages of the Caucasus (including the East Caucasian family). In our talk we will describe the way Mehweb Dargwa (East Caucasian) meets the UD scheme.