Laboratory seminars

This paper studies the phenomenon of preposition drop — cases where preposition does not appear when we expect it to — in particular, in locative, directional and temporal adverbial phrases. We review and classify the existing analyses of the phenomenon that were proposed for different languages, predominantly non-standard and contact varieties. Next, we proceed to our quantitative study of preposition drop in Russian spoken in Daghestan, based on data collected from the sociolinguistic interviews of the DagRus corpus. We show how preposition drop depends on various linguistic and sociolinguistic factors, employing statistical methods. Level of Russian, preposition type and phonetic context turn out to be good predictors for preposition drop. We propose a functional explanation for the observed pattern.

According to Ferguson (1959), in a diglossic situation two distinct varieties of a language (‘high’, learned by formal education, and ‘low’ colloquial) are spoken in the same community. He claims that High variety always exists in a stable codified form, whereas Low demonstrates wide variation in grammar and vocabulary. Although this is the case for some diglossic societies (such as Tamil), for others the situation is the opposite . My corpus analysis of Katharevousa (official language of Greece till 1976) demonstrates the instability of this register in the domain of spatial relations.

Reported speech markers constitute a substantial part of evidentiality’s semantic domain. At the same time, the internal division of this subdomain into specific values remains disputed. Aikhenvald (2004) proposed an important distinction of reportative and quotative markers: reportatives refer to information based on hearsay, while quotatives refer to information based on the verbal report of a particular source. Several authors have since argued that quotatives (in contrast with reportatives) are not proper evidentials (among them are Boye (2010) and Holvoet (2018)), because they designate a proposition, rather than specify the speaker’s information source. In this talk I will discuss the typology of reported speech evidentials and compare the properties of "quotative" markers from a variety of languages to determine whether they can be viewed as evidentials.

This is a study of grammaticalization sources of postpositions across East Caucasian languages. The focus is on the postpositions grammaticalized from nouns denoting body parts. While these nouns cross-linguistically often grammaticalize into spatial markers, in particular adpositions, this path does not seem to be typical of (all) East Caucasian. Postpositions from body parts are not equally spread across the family. Some languages have many, some few, and some none at all. The goal of this study is to provide an account for their distribution in genealogical and areal terms.

Demonstratives, in addition to the main deictic uses, cross-linguistically often acquire a number of other functions, including anaphora. The majority of East Caucasian have rich inventories of demonstrative pronouns that employ three or more different stems covering various dimensions of deixis (distance, altitude and other). Most languages of Dagestan do not have a special 3rd person nominal pronoun and use attributive demonstratives instead.
The main goal of my study is to examine what governs the choice of the stem to be used anaphorically (for example only proximal one) or, if all stems of an inventory are used in this function, how are they distributed in this function by frequency. My study is based on grammars and samples of narrative texts. In this presentation, only data from Lezgic languages will be discussed.

In this paper I discuss a typologically peculiar inverse-like construction found in the polysynthetic ergative Circassian languages of the Northwest-Caucasian family and will argue that this construction has been borrowed into Abaza belonging to a different branch of the same family. These languages possess a cislocative verbal prefix, which, in addition to marking the spatial meaning of speaker-orientation, systematically occurs in polyvalent verbs when the object outranks the subject on the person hierarchy. The inverse-like use of the cislocative in Circassian differs from the “canonical” direct-inverse system in that, first, it is fully redundant since the person-role linking is achieved by means of the person markers themselves and, second, it does not occur in the basic transitive construction, featuring instead in configurations involving an indirect object both in ditransitive and bivalent intransitive verbs. I argue that the similar use of the cislocative prefix observed in Abaza is a result of pattern-borrowing from Kabardian, with which Abaza has been in intense contact, and that this borrowing has resulted in the increase of both paradigmatic and syntagmatic complexity of Abaza verbal morphology.

Five geographically close languages to the east of the Baltic sea – Russian (East Slavic), Latvian (Baltic), Ingrian, Votic and Ingrian Finnish (Finnic) – use a similar pattern for marking subject reference. In this pattern both personal pronouns and subject agreement on the verb are employed (from ⅔ to ¾ of all occurrences). This happens with all types of personhood:
(1) Russian:
Ja id-u domoj
I.NOM go.PRS-1SG home
‘I go home’
(2) Latvian:
par k-o t-u domā-ø ? -
about what-ACC 2SG-NOM think.PRS-2SG
‘What are you thinking about?’
(3) Ingrian:
hǟ kūl-i-ø
3SG.NOM die-PST-3SG
‘She is dead’
However, this double-marking pattern is extremely uncommon over the world where most languages are either pro-drop with verbal inflection (61%, WALS) or non-pro-drop without any additional verbal inflection (Siewierska 2004). Taken together the geographical proximity of the languages under discussion and the typological rarity of the referential pattern itself, one can treat it as an areal feature which could not arise independently (Kibrik 2013). The talk will trace this feature diachronically and discuss the results for Russian, Latvian and minor Finnic. Special attention will be given to the controversy of whether we deal with a similar contact-induced change in Latvian and minor Finnic or with two different processes that eventually converged into an apparently similar pattern.

The typological atlas of Daghestan will be a WALS style resource containing information about linguistic features in the languages of Daghestan. Data for this resource are retrieved from grammars and organized into databases which are then used to generate maps. The final product will be a tool for the visualization of information about linguistic structures characteristic of Daghestan, but also a useful resource for bibliographical research on parameters of interest. In this talk we will discuss the state of affairs of the project and our future plans. We will briefly present the preliminary results related to the features that are currently being developed, and we will discuss some technical issues concerning the design of introductory texts and the generation of maps.

The goal of our study is to examine the Albanian dialect continuum using the quantitative methods of dialectometry and interpret the results in terms of the history of the Albanian dialect landscape, in particular its contact history. Our data come from the Dialectological Atlas of Albanian Language that maps phonological, morphological and lexical features of 131 Albanian varieties of the main dialectal area. Using distance calculation, MDS analysis and hierarchical clustering, we estimate and visualize the closeness of these varieties and analyse it against their geographical distribution and the traditional classification of Albanian dialects.
The main focus of our talk will be on the notion of linguistic complexity as applied to the Albanian dialect continuum. We identify 27 phonological and morphological parameters as binary complexity/simplicity features, examine their realization in the varieties under study and assess the relation between intensity of contact and linguistic complexity. Then we will briefly discuss the distribution of the varieties in terms of 212 lexical features to compare their grammatical and lexical closeness.

We will present a new small corpus of contact-influenced Russian speech, namely the Corpus of Russian spoken in Northern Siberia and the Russian Far East, and several case studies on contact phenomena in grammar, based on its data.
The corpus consists of short oral texts, mostly narratives, collected as a “by-product” of language documentation projects (some of them are Russian versions of texts in the corresponding indigenous language). The current size of the corpus is ca. 34 hours (78452 tokens). The majority of texts come from two regions - the Taimyr peninsula (the subcorpus of Samoyedic Russian) and Khabarovsk Krai (the subcorpus of Tungusic Russian).
The most important feature of the corpus is the manual annotation of grammatical and lexical contact-induced features. It will be discussed in detail with a focus on problematic cases.
To illustrate the range of problems that can be investigated on the data of this corpus, we will also present several case studies. First, we will try to trace a post-pidgin continuum, attested among the Nganasans, on the data of non-standard gender agreement patterns (cf. бабка помер ‘old woman die.pst.masc’). Second, we will consider a problem of identifying morpho-syntactic calques on the example of non-standard numeral constructions, attested in Tungusic Russian (пять дом ‘five house.nom.sg’, двое сыновья ‘two son.nom.pl’). Third, we will illustrate the problem of differentiation between contact-induced and dialectal features on the example of pluperfect be-constructions (умер было ‘(he) died be.pst’) and non-standard coordination patterns with the particle da (офицер=да, майор=да ‘officers=ptcl majors=ptcl’), attested in the speech of the Nanais. Finally, we will discuss some general quantitative data on contact-induced grammatical features attested in the corpus, namely the general frequency distribution of different types of these features and individual profiles, compiled for several speakers.

In this talk, present an introduction to modern Bayesian phylogenetic analysis in historical linguistics. Algorithms will be discussed with special focus in its conceptual motivations, as well as its scope and limitations. Wordlist building and handling will be approached from a practical perspective, including recommendations and examples of implementation. Cross-linguistic online resources and edition tools for this task will be presented.
At the end of the seminar, in a separate bonus track we will introduce you to the ongoing collection of 100 Swadesh lists in Daghestan. Our approach emphasizes the importance of strict provenance of the list (village of collection) and the importance of the protocol for data collection (contextualization of the lexical items). If we have time, we will show the preliminary results of the project - the tree of the Andic branch as based on our data.

The scholars focusing on sociolinguistic situations in ancient societies have no direct access to information about the boundaries of language communities at given points in time but have to study them through the prism of the available written sources. Since the notion of language shift is equally applicable to population groups and epigraphic cultures, and since it can be accompanied by contact-induced changes in both cases, it is appropriate to ask a question how the difference between the two types of communities correlates with different manifestations of language contact.
Both corpora of spoken languages and archaic written texts commonly feature results of lexical transfer (borrowings) as well as structural interference. They seem, however, to exhibit inverse chronological correlation between the two types of contact-induced changes and the moment of language shift. When language contact is observed among population groups, lexical expansion frequently predates the shift to a new native language, while structural changes continue to reflect substrate influence after the act of language shift has taken place. In contrast, in the instance of archaic epigraphic cultures (e.g. hieroglyphs or the cuneiform), late or peripheral texts in a particular language frequently reveal deviations in grammatical structure, while written language shift in a scribal community may be accompanied by the retention of graphic loanwords (heterograms), which represent the language of tradition. In my talk I intend to address the reasons for such an asymmetry, and to discuss the peculiarities of some contact situations that do not fall under the proposed generalization.

Population size is often discussed as a factor which might have influenced patterns of language and cultural evolution (Bowern 2010; Donohue & Nichols 2011; Nettle 2012; Bromham et al. 2015; Greenhill et al. 2018; Koplenig 2019; see Greenhill 2014 for an overview). In this paper, we advance the hypothesis that the larger is the population of language speakers, the less is the number of L2 mastered by these speakers.
The correlation between the size of language population and the level of multilingualism of its speakers is tested statistically on a large body of empirical data from Dagestan. Due to the digitalization of the Census of 1926, we have at our disposal reliable information about the population of Dagestanian villages before the urbanization and the rise of population caused by the First Demographic Transition. These data allow us to make credible estimations of the number of speakers of all languages and dialects of Dagestan before the changes of 20th century.
The second type of data comes from a field study of Dagestanian multilingualism. Language repertoires of 4,032 people were collected and coded by using the method of retrospective family interviews during field research in 2011 - 2019. The data on multilingual repertoires covers only a small part of the villages for which we have population sizes, namely 54 villages speaking 29 different lects.
We match population sizes of these 29 languages and the number of L2s spoken by the speakers of these languages from 54 villages, and run a Poisson mixed effects regression model that predicts the average number of second languages spoken by speakers from L1 communities of different size. The study confirms the hypothesis that the size of language population is negatively correlated with the multilingualism of the language community.

In this talk I will focus on the emphatic identity particle in the Volga-Kama languages (Chuvash =aχ/ =eχ, Tatar and Bashkir =uk/ =ük, Meadow Mari =ak, Hill Mari =ok and Udmurt =ik). The particle was borrowed from the Turkic (Bulgar) lects to the Finno-Ugric lects of the Sprachbund. Its contexts of use overlap to a fair extent in different languages but do not fully coincide. One of the core functions is that =OK is used when an argument of a proposition is identical to an argument of a different proposition (e.g. that house=OK 'the same house', referring to a previously mentioned house). In this talk I will take a closer look at this and other contexts of use of =OK in the languages of the area. Besides, =OK tends to attach and become lexicalized with some items, mostly adverbial expressions. I will present data on the frequencies of such collocations with =OK in the Volga-Kama Sprachbund.

Regions of the North Caucasus have experienced considerable social changes within the recent 4-5 decades, which included intensive urbanization, loosening of traditional family norms, weakening of gender asymmetries and lowering of empowerment of elder generations in communities and families. These processes started at different time and went with different speed in the republics of the North Caucasus, but in all the republics they were accompanied by a significant decrease of fertility, known as the First Demographic Transition (FDT) in population studies. That decrease was not at all unexpected, as ‘detraditionalization’ changes of the kind recently observed in the North Caucasus and the First Demographic Transition took place nearly simultaneously in many parts of the world.
However, a number of cultural characteristics of the North Caucasus allows to address some issues concerning the First Demographic Transition which are difficult to consider elsewhere. First, at the start of the social and demographic changes women of different ethnicities differed in their fertility levels. As urbanization made interethnic contacts more intensive, the question arises whether these differences were eliminated in the process of the fertility decrease. Second, in urban population of the North Caucasus, including younger generations, the proportion of speaking indigenous languages is not negligible. Therefore, it is possible to consider the hypothesis that in families where an indigenous language is spoken in everyday life fertility will not decrease so radically as in families where Russian is the only spoken language of the parents. If this expectation is borne out, we get an interesting case where linguistic and reproductive behavior are related.
The talk will start with introducing the concept of the First Demographic Transition. Then we present the key demographic changes observed in the North Caucasus between the 1970s and the 2010s. After that, using data from the Republic of Daghestan (Russian Census 2010 and a sample survey of 2018), we demonstrate that ethnic differences in fertility were preserved to different extent in different educational groups of urban population. Also, using data from the Republics of Ingushetia (a sample survey of 2019), we show that parents’ speaking an indigenous language really has a positive significant relation to fertility.

West Circassian, along with the other languages of the Northwest Caucasian family, is a highly polysynthetic language with complex verbal morphology. One marker in particular, the causative marker ʁe- , is highly productive. The morphological causative is commonly used to derive transitive predicates from nontransitive verbs and nominals. It is also, clearly, an important instrument for expressing the semantics of causation and in the associated valency increasing operation. In some cases ʁe- has even calcified on predicates, so that the predicate has no meaning without the causative prefix. It is therefore rather remarkable that a periphrastic causative strategy has arisen in West Circassian. This construction is based on the matrix verb ṣ̂ə- 'to do, make', which pairs with a lexical verb with the purposive suffixation. Based on observations of the behavior of personal indexes on the matrix verb it is apparent that this structure is noncompositional and has grammaticalized with causative semantics which are the same as those of the morphological causative.

In this talk we will discuss the phenomenon of preposition drop (omission) that is observed in the speech of L2 speakers of Russian with a Nakh-Daghestanian or Turkic (Kumyk, Azerbaijani) first language. We shall first review insights on the issue from the existing literature on the topic (Daniel & Dobrushina 2009, Daniel, Dobrushina & Knyazev 2010, Daniel & Dobrushina 2013 for Russian spoken in Daghestan; Stoynova and Shluinsky 2010 for Russian spoken by the Enets people; Khomchenkova, Pleshak and Stoynova 2017 for Russian of Northern Siberia and Russian Far East; Shagal 2016 for Russian spoken by the Erzya people), then present the data on preposition drop in the Russian speech of Kumyk and Azerbaijani native speakers, and suggest working hypotheses about the theoretical interpretation of the phenomenon that would guide our further work.

Causative alternations database There are several kinds of correspondence between causative and non-causative verbs: one can be derived from the other, they can be suppletive etc. These correspondences differ not only from language to language, but also from one causative pair to another within one language. The database was created so that one could deal with exact numbers of these alternations in many languages. I am going to talk about the data, the structure of the database and its challenges.

The term colexification (François 2008) refers to instances where the same word expresses two or more comparable concepts, covering instances of polysemy, vagueness, and homonymy. The comparative study of colexifications across languages allows for the construction of semantic maps, a useful tool for the study of lexical typology and beyond, ranging from studies on semantic change, patterns of conceptualization, and linguistic paleontology. In this talk, we describe the recently released third version of the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications, CLICS³ https://clics.clld.org/ (Rzymski, Tresoldi, et al. 2019), a computer-assisted framework for the interactive representation of cross-linguistic colexification patterns, containing data for 2811 concepts across 2955 languages.

Variation is inherent to all languages. Ɨt seems, however, that the degree of variation can vary from language to language. It is sometimes claimed that languages with writing systems show more variation than unwritten languages. It was also argued that small languages have less variation than large languages with many L2 speakers. It seems, however, that none of these conjectures were ever empirically tested. In fact, to date we have no methods which would allow measuring and comparing the amount of variation between languages. In this talk I want to raise this problem rather than suggest a solution.

During fieldwork researchers have to deal with all kinds of variation in the answers given by speakers: free variation, idolectal or sociolinguistic variation. In the present investigation we studied the degree of variation among 44 speakers of Zilo Andi for 16 different morpho(no)logical features known to be variable in this dialect. Additionally, we conducted a survey among a number of researchers of Nakh-Daghestanian languages, asking them about their fieldwork habits - including questions about how many speakers they usually consult. We used these data to evaluate the probability that an average researcher of Nakh-Daghestanian languages catches the observed variation during fieldwork.

This paper summarises a joint study by Yuri Koryakov, Andrey Shluinsky, and myself, see (Khanina et al. 2018a, Khanina et al. 2018b). Through a series of linguistic maps based on published ethnographic data and our fieldwork accounts, we reconstruct the territories in which Forest Enets and Tundra Enets (Samoyedic, Uralic; Central Siberia) have been spoken from the 17th century till today. We analyze in details migrations of the two ethnic groups and the changing language contact scenarios. One of the most intriguing findings of this study is an explanation of the Forest Enets - Tundra Enets puzzle.
There is no unanimity whether they are separate languages or dialects of the same language. Ethnographically, the two linguistic communities are clearly distinct, have different self-nominations, and do not consider themselves as belonging to the same ethnic group. As our field experience has shown, the degree of modern mutual comprehension is not a neutral question and depends on the stance that a speaker takes at the moment of conversation, whether stressing the difference between the two ethnic groups or aiming at reaching his/her communicative goal. Whereas the phonologies of Forest Enets and Tundra Enets suggest a split of at least several hundred years ago, and lexicostatistical calculations go even further by dating the split ca. one thousand years ago, the match between the two Enets grammars is so striking that it contradicts this scenario.
So here the linguistic geography steps in, documenting migrations that led to a secondary convergence in the 19th century of the once more distinct Enets lects, which was later, in the beginning of the 20th century, followed by a secondary divergence. We support this historic hypothesis with a catalogue of all features that separate the two Enets varieties and with linguistic maps reconstructing changes in the territories of the two ethnic groups in the last 300 years.

References
Khanina, Olesya, Koryakov, Yuri & Andrey Shluinsky. 2018a. Enets in space and time: a case study in linguistic geography. Finnisch-Ugrische Mitteilungen 42, 109-135.
Khanina, Olesya, Shluinsky, Andrey & Yuri Koryakov. 2018b. Forest Enets and Tundra Enets: how similar/different are they and why? Paper presented at the 7th international conference on samoyedology, October 2018 (Tartu, Estonia).

Western Africa occupies a central place in the research on multilingualism due to the studies on the sociolinguistic situation in Cameroon (di Carlo 2018) and the Casamance area in Senegal (Lüpke and Storch 2013; Lüpke 2016). The study focuses on yet another case of multiligualism in Western Africa by discussing the multilingualism patterns in the area of Fouta-Djallon plateau in Guinea. The situation will be analyzed in the perspective of communities speaking Kakabe, a minor language spoken in about fifty villages. The involved languages are Kakabe, Maninka, Pular, and, to a lesser extent, Sussu, with Pular belonging to the Atlantic family and the three other languages to the Mande family. In my talk, I will analyze the attested multilingualism patterns in different types of language practices. The study is based on a multi-media oral corpus representative of a variety of genres and containing data that I have been collecting in the region since 2009.

The East-Caucasian languages (Nakh-Daghestanian) show a number of puzzling structures that are challenging from the theoretical point of view: non-finite clauses where all the arguments are encoded in the same way as in independent sentences, backward control, long-distance reflexive pronouns and long-distance agreement in complement clauses. This talk is focused on long-distance agreement in East Caucasian languages. First, I discuss the phenomenon in Qunqi Dargwa. The infinitives and converbs are the only complementation strategies that allow long-distance agreement. In Qunqi, there is a fuzzy boundary between infinitives and indirect mood forms. The converbs are used both with control verbs and with emotive and perception complement-taking verbs. The long-distance agreement pattern is only observed with control verbs. I show that these structures show properties of clause union. Then I consider the data of 19 East-Caucasian languages (mostly based on the data from Kibrik 2005 "Materials to the typology of ergativity"), and discuss the long-distance agreement patterns in those languages. In most of these languages this phenomenon is limited to control constructions, while Tsez and Tsakhur deviate from this generalization.

Polynesia covers a vast territory of the planet. It includes a large number of speech communities which descend from a common ancestor; some them are isolated by thousands of miles of open ocean. No wonder, Polynesia has always been the favorite place for both linguists and anthropologists working on phylogenetics. The standard account of the Eastern Polynesian subgrouping is that the language of Easter Island (Rapanui) forms a branch on its own, coordinated with Central Polynesian languages; CE in turns branches into Tahitic and Marquesic (Roger 1985). It has been becoming more and more evident that Tahitic and Marquesic are not valid subgroups (Vladimir Belikov 2009, Mary Walworth 2014). In my talk, I am going to show that Rapanui, Mangarevan, North and South Marquesan constitute a subgroup within Eastern Polynesian languages. Interestingly enough, this proposal implies some phonological and lexical innovations spreading across the Pacific. The main objective of the talk is to discuss the latter and their implications for the theory of language.

The opposition of the geminate and singleton ejective lateral stop /L'/, reconstructed to proto-Andic, has been lost in various Andic languages due to the phonetic evolution of the simpleton into a different soundtype. The speakers of Rikvani Andi, a dialect of Andi (Andic, East Caucasian) spoken by 800 people in the village of Rikvani in Dagestan, developed a glottalized lateral consonant as a reflex. Glottalized sonorants are a typological rara. While they have been sparsely attested in various areas where glottalic initiation also occurs with stops (ejectives), Rikvani Andi is the only variety of a Caucasian language where it has so far been reported.
The present study is an acoustic analysis of the sound as documented in the field data collected by the HSE team in the village. Data from six speakers's word list elicitation as well as from spontaneous texts from two speakers are used. This study is the first that considers glottalized sonorants in connected free speech. We test several generalizations and observations previously made wrt glottalized sonorants (Um 2001, Maddieson and Larson 2002, Maddieson et al. 2009). We confirm presence of strong variation of the realization of the glottliazed /lˀ/ across speakers in terms of presence of creaky voice, focus of glottalization, intensiity and formant structure. We do not confirm Um's suggestion that the peak of glottal construction (pre- vs. post-glottalized realization) is affected by the poisition of the sound in syllable/word. We conclude that the distinctive feature is the presence of creaky voice and intensity, but these features become less pronounced in free speech. Finding the acoustic cue that serves to distinguish glottalized sonorant requires further acoustic research. Variation across speakers and fading away of the cues in connected speech may suggest that a merger of /lˀ/ and /l/ is on its way.
Various visualization techniques highlighting the nature of /lˀ/ will be discussed.

In August of 2019 we visited the village of Botlikh to study the Botlikh language. Our aim was to collect some data for a small investigation on agreement patterns of ordinal numerals. In addition, we translated several texts recorded by Togo Gudava in the 1950s-1960s, met a number of potential language consultants and learned some new things about the sociolinguistic situation in Botlikh. We will talk about the trip and our future plans for working on this language.

Bantu expansion is among the most important and least understood human migrations. Bantu-speaking populations (240 million people, 500 languages, spanning 9 million km2 [1]) are the result of a huge migration originating in a homeland near the border of Nigeria and Cameroon between 4,000BP and 5,000BP [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Although the homeland and the time depth are well established, the migration route is still unclear.

Recent phylogenetic studies [1,9,6,7,8] support the late-split [10,11,12,13,14], which claims that East-Bantu and West-Bantu languages' common ancestor crossed the African Rainforest, splitting after this. It is thought that this crossing was made through the Sangha River Interval (SRI), a N-S savanna opening into the rainforest. However, in dated phylogenies [7], dates don't match consistently: They should have crossed this corridor around 4,000BP, while it was completely open only 2,500BP.

We propose two different hypotheses for competing with the traditional SRI late-split. The first, a coastal savanna corridor [15]. The second, an earlier paath through the rainforest. We compare the hypotheses with a Bayesian phylogeographic approach based on linguistic trees. We use lexical and geographical data for 400+ Bantu and Bantoid languages, inferring the linguistic and geographic history in parallel, by implementing the break-away model [16] in BEAST2 [17]. We conclude that the way through the rainforest happened around 4,000BP.

The paper deals with non-standard word order in the variety of Russian spoken by bilinguals from Daghestan. Specifically, we focus on the occurrence of prepositive genitive modifiers in bilinguals’ speech. Whereas in monolinguals’ Russian the neutral and most frequent word order in noun phrases with a genitive modifier is the order N+GEN, in Daghestanian Russian the opposite order GEN+N often occurs. This phenomenon was mentioned as one of the striking morphosyntactic features of Daghestanian Russian, and its frequent occurrence can be partly explained in terms of syntactic calquing from speakers’ L1s, all featuring an unmarked GEN+N order in noun phrases. However, the picture is far less trivial than it could look at first sight. On the one hand, the word-order pattern GEN+N does not seem to affect equally all types of genitive noun phrases in Daghestanian Russian. On the other hand, similar examples of non-standard word order are sometimes found in monolinguals’ speech too. In the course of the paper, we present the results of our corpus-based investigation of genitive noun phrases in Daghestanian Russian as compared to monolinguals’ spoken Russian, including dialectal varieties. Prepositive genitives appear to be favored by several lexico-semantic and processing features of both the head and the genitive dependent. The strongest factor is kinship semantics: noun phrases that express a kinship relation tend to be prepositive. In monolinguals’ spoken Russian, although prepositive genitives are very infrequent, they sometimes show similar lexico-semantic and processing features. Therefore, we are not dealing with a simple calquing process. Rather, L1 influence is manifested in the strengthening of some tendencies existing in monolinguals’ Russian too.

The paper investigates the role that the rate of bilingualism plays in lexical borrowing. Our data comes from Daghestan, an area of high language density. Based on loanword counts, we isolate two zones of lexical influence, the south, heavily influenced by Azerbaijani, and the north, dominated by Avar. This salience of Avar and Azerbaijani as donor languages is likely to reflect the historical role of these languages as lingua francas in their respective geographical zones. The study supports the idea of Brown (1996, 2011) that contact influence from a lingua franca is higher than from a language only used to communicate with its L1 speakers. In line with the widespread argument that the amount of contact-induced change from a language is proportional to intensity of bilingualism (Thomason & Kaufman 1988), Brown stipulates that the importance of lingua francas as lexical donors must be linked to the high rate of bilingualism in these languages. The bilingualism in Azerbaijani and Avar was indeed high, as the evidence from field research on traditional language repertoires of Daghestanian highlanders shows. On the other hand, the knowledge of two other locally important languages, Chechen and Georgian, which was, at some locations, only slightly lower, did not lead to the same level of lexical transfer; in fact, the amount of Georgian and Chechen borrowings seems disproportionately low. High bilingualism rates are thus not sufficient for a language to become a major lexical donor. At the level of methodology, the paper explores the prospects of using short wordlists as ‘contact probes’, tools for measuring lexical contact. We follow the approach by Haspelmath & Tadmor (2009) and Bowern et al. (2011) in applying a fixed list of concept to quantify lexical contact between languages. Based on field elicitations conducted in a number of villages in the Republic of Daghestan, a list of 160 concepts is shown to be efficient enough to differentiate the degrees of lexical impact from the locally important L2’s to minority languages. The method does not only ensure comparability across contact situations but also provides a level of resolution that is sensitive to differences between villages speaking the same language. By fine-tuning the wordlist to a different linguistic setting, the methodology suggested here may be extended to other geographical areas of intense language contact and become a tool for reconstructing multilingual patterns of the past.

In a recent paper (Naccarato, Panova & Stoynova Forth.), we have examined cases of non-standard word order in the variety of Russian spoken by bilinguals from Daghestan. Specifically, we have restricted our analysis to the noun phrase, and have looked at the occurrence of prepositive genitive modifiers in bilinguals’ speech. As we have shown, whereas in Standard Russian the neutral and most frequent word order in noun phrases with a genitive modifier is the order N+GEN (muž sestry), in Daghestanian Russian the opposite order GEN+N (sestry muž) often occurs. This phenomenon has been partly explained in terms of syntactic calquing from speakers’ L1s, all featuring a neutral GEN+N order in noun phrases. However, such inversion in word order does not seem to equally affect all types of genitive noun phrases in Daghestanian Russian, but appears to correlate significantly with noun phrases featuring kinship semantics. Moreover, similar examples of non-standard word order are sometimes found in monolinguals’ speech too, which makes the picture far less trivial than it could look at first sight. In this talk, we present the latest results of our corpus-based investigation of genitive noun phrases in Daghestanian Russian as compared to monolinguals’ spoken varieties of Russian, with the aim of explaining the factors boosting non-standard word-order realizations.

Botlikh (Avar-Andic, East Caucasian) features a two-fold animacy agreement system including, on the one hand, a set of noun class (i.e. gender) markers representative of many EC languages and, on the other hand, an additional set of dedicated animacy markers which are unique to Botlikh. The dedicated animacy markers can appear on various targets (i.e. negative copulas, interrogative particles, question word formants, attributive clitics, present/future participles, ordinal numerals), and agreement is controlled by either the nominal head or the absolutive argument of the verb. By focusing on ordinal numerals, which appear to mark animacy most consistently, we set the following goals: a) to better understand the agreement patterns of these forms; b) to clarify which referents qualify as animates and which do not. For these purposes, we have created the first draft of a survey which we will discuss during the talk.

Most descriptions of Abaza mention two affixes which express the meaning of refactive (‘again’, ‘once more’, etc.): the suffix -χ and the prefix ata-, which almost always appears only in combination with -χ. I argue that the main difference between these two refactive markers is that the marker -χ “sees” the internal structure of an event and can have scope over any part of it (just the resultant state, or just the process, with or without arguments), while the marker ata-+-χ is “blind” to the internal structure of the situation and can only “copy” the whole event with its arguments.

In this talk we introduce our first pilot database for the DagLoans project. The database contains translations of 160 concepts collected in the field in Daghestan (and Northern Azerbaijan). At present, this includes a total of 24.785 entries from 23 different languages. The database can be used to find the translation of a concept in one or more languages. The most important feature is “Set”: all entries are grouped in sets with other similar words, which allows us to plot the spread of lexical items on the map. The database can be used for conducting quantitative research on lexical convergence as well as for creating geographical maps showing the areas and the intensity of foreign influence.

The most common statistical task is hypothesis testing. When a pair of competing models is fully defined, their definition immediately leads to a measure of how strongly each model supports the data. The ratio of their support is often called the likelihood ratio or the Bayes factor. During the talk I will show how to define different models and compare them with Bayes factor.

In Modern Standard Russian, the prefix/preposition pair u-/u is peculiar with respect to other similar pairs, due to the meaning mismatch between the two. While the prefix u- has an ablative meaning, as shown when it is prefixed to motion verbs, the prepositional phrase u+gen occurs in locative constructions, and other related constructions, such as predicative possession that is expressed via the cross-linguistically common Locative Schema. Etymological considerations show that the meaning preserved by the prefix is older. The only type of occurrence which, according to the literature, preserves the ablative meaning for the u+gen construction preposition is found with verbs of requesting, removing, and buying. Notably, however, in other Slavic languages putative ablative contexts are limited to verbs of requesting. Data from MSR, OCS, Polish and Czech lead to the conclusion that the extension of the u+gen construction to verbs of removing in MSR is based on its use for the encoding of predicative possession. Extension to verbs of buying is better explained through the locative meaning of the construction. As a result of different developments, the u+gen construction has become part of the argument structure of a group of verbs including verbs of asking and requesting, verbs of removing and verbs of buying, which are characterized by the common feature of taking human non-recipient third arguments.

Kunbarlang is a critically endangered polysynthetic language spoken in central Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, by approximately 40 people. It belongs to the non-Pama-Nyungan Gunwinyguan family.

This talk reports on the first comprehensive description of Kunbarlang (although it builds on and extends important unpublished work by Carolyn Coleman and Joy Kinslow Harris). Kunbarlang has very rich verbal morphology that includes complex agreement paradigms, composite TMA system that differs from other Gunwinyguan languages, an array of argument derivation tools, and coverb constructions. The nominal domain, on the contrary, has little morphology and relies heavily on syntactic constructions - for instance, case marking of nouns is analytical.

The talk will give a general overview of the grammar, and then focus on a few selected topics across different areas.

It is generally believed that Russian has no sequence of tenses (SoT) in complement clauses, and the choice of absolute tense over relative is considered to be a typical error in the interlanguage of non-standard speakers of Russian as a foreign language whose native language features SoT, e.g. English. However, all uses of absolute tense in Learner Russian cannot qualify as errors, since Standard Russian shows a great deal of variation in tense assignment in complement clauses. One of the factors that is said to govern tense choice is the semantics of the matrix verb (Barentsen, 1996; Гиро-Вебер, 1975, Schlenker, 2003, inter alia). Specifically, speech and mental verbs are said to strictly require the relative tense, whereas sensory, emotion, and existential matrix verbs allow for both absolute and relative tense patterns. Despite the acknowledged variation, the precise distributional patterns of tenses in complement clauses have been understudied. This paper is a systematic corpus-based study of the variation in tense choice across the semantic classes of the matrix verbs in two language varieties: (i) Standard Russian as represented in the Russian National Corpus and (ii) Learner Russian of anglophone speakers as represented in the Russian Learner Corpus. I examine those clausal complexes where the matrix verb in the past tense and the verb of the complement clause denote simultaneous actions.

The analysis identified a likelihood hierarchy of verbal semantic classes ranging from the least likely to tolerate past tense in the complement clauses to the most likely ones: speech<mental<sensory≈emotion

Within the framework of Multidagestan project, vast amount of sociolinguistic data about traditional small-scale multilingualism was collected in Daghestan. The aim of the project is to trace the change of the multilingual patterns in the 20th century. However, 71 percent of the data were collected in an indirect way, asking people about their relatives. We will discuss the statistical methods that we used to check the robustness of the indirectly collected sociolinguistic data.

The particle =OK, originally Turkic, is attested in all the core members of the Volga-Kama Sprachbund: Chuvash =aχ/ =eχ, Tatar and Bashkir =uk/ =ük, Meadow Mari =ak, Hill Mari =ok and Udmurt =ik. Meadow Mari, Hill Mari and Udmurt have arguably borrowed the particle from Turkic (Bulgar).

=OK is used in contexts many of which may be characterized as emphatic identity contexts: the argument marked by =OK is the same as an argument of a different proposition (≈ Russian že: Masha rabotajet v pole, Masha že sidit s det'mi 'Mary works in the field and it is also she who sits with the children').

However, in different languages =OK exhibits different morphosyntactic restrictions on the constituent to which it may attach, i.e. in Tatar it attaches to demonstratives (šul uk keše 'the same person') but not to proper names (*Märijäm ük 'it is also Mary who...'). In Chuvash, Meadow and Hill Mari and Udmurt the particle can attach to proper names. =OK can also attach to the verb, with different interpretations and again with different morphosyntactic restrictions.

There are similar constructions and lexicalizations with =OK in some of the languages (e.g. reduplication construction of the type V-converb=OK V).

I would like to discuss whether -- and how -- we can approach these similar patterns in terms of contact. From the literature we know what were the strongest bonds in the area (Chuvash-Mari, Tatar-Meadow Mari, Tatar-Bashkir). The question is whether greater and weaker similarity of =OK morphosyntactic, construction and lexicalization patterns between languages corresponds to areal affinity and how to demonstrate it.

In this SMALL discussion, we will present the path taken so far for the methods of inter-dialectal comparison, the point we are currently standing (or stuck) at, and will gratefully take advices as to how to proceed.

We will first remind of the starting point of the project, ie a mehod of isolating inter-dialectal divergence that takes into account inter-speaker variation. Than we will briefly overview the steps we did so far (LogLikelihood, Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test, Gries' DP). We will then focus on the very last result we got, evaluating the observed DP value against the simluation and permutation test for the distribution of the DP in a random sample - and whether we can use it for our purposes.

In this paper, I consider several Lezgic languages suffixes (possibly, but not definitely related) that cover a rather wide range of contexts. Some contexts of their use may be qualified as denoting unrealized state-of-affairs (such as conditional clauses, polar questions, and, to a certain extent, indefinite pronouns). Some others fall short of this definition, including indirect questions and other subordinate clauses with WH-words. The set of contexts covered by the markers in question is one and the same in at least three Lezgic languages (Lezgian, Aghul, Tabassaran), and also in Azerbaijani, which raises a question of possible contact origin of this pattern. Some other Lezgic languages employ, in these contexts, several different markers. Kina dialect of Rutul presents an especially interesting case, combining in one morpheme (-jden) the meanings which are unlikely to be associated. In this talk, I will present the case of Kina Rutul in details, discuss possible interpretation and origins of the marker -jden, and compare Kina Rutul with other Lezgic languages.

In this talk, we will discuss modifying participial constructions which is a predominant type of relative clauses in East Caucasian languages. One of the key properties of participles in East Caucasian languages is the lack of syntactic orientation. There is little to no syntactic restrictions on what can be relativized: the gap in the relative clause can correspond to a core argument, a peripheral participant or even a participant that is not part of the verb’s argument structure. Languages also share some common patterns of constructionalization of specififc relative construction (such as name-constructions). On the other hand, there is variation across languages, e.g. more or less strongly articulated preference for S relativization; or more or less widespread use of the resumptives; and language-particular features, e.g. a very high ratio of addresse relativization (in name-constructions) in Agul. After a general overview of the problems related to the study of relativization targets, we concentrate on language-particular case studies and discuss the counts of relativization targets in the corpora of two East Caucasian languages (Agul and Archi). As a comparative background, West Circassian corpus data will be presented. In this language relativization is syntactically oriented, the strategy cannot be classified as participial, and special reflexivizers may be interpreted as obligatorified resumptive pronouns. Finally, we discuss the comparison of corpus counts on the relativized syntactic role in the three languages, and the problems connected to such comparison.

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).

The project "Atlas of Multilingualism of Daghestan" is based on sociolinguistic interviews recorded in Daghestan by the team of this project over the course of seven years. The aim of the project is to determine the level of bilingualism in Daghestanian mountain villages and describe the sociolinguistic patterns of linguistic convergence of local languages. In addition, the project allows to establish the type of linguistic contact characteristic of neighboring villages, which languages not pertaining to a particular area were spoken by inhabitants, how the command of Russian changed, what role the geographic distance between languages played and how the command of certain languages was distributed among inhabitants of a village. This talk will focus on two topics: first of all, we will show the results of a study of how the command of languages was distributed among men and women and how these dynamics have evolved since the beginning of the 20th century until now. Second, we will discuss some problems and shortcomings of the method used and we will suggest some verification methods.

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 talk presents the Spoken Meadow Mari corpus project. Meadow Mari is a Uralic language spoken in the Volga region by some 375 thousand people. The core of the corpus are recordings made in 2000-2001 by a group of researchers from the Lomonosov Moscow State University. In our talk we will discuss the data we have, possible applications of the project and the target audiences of the corpus, as well as its structure. Making the corpus data presentable involves transcribing, glossing and annotating the data as well as aligning audio and text which should facilitate data analysis.

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.

The talk presents the "Dialectal variation in Even" project. The project works with two dialects of Even: the easternmost one spoken in the village Sebjan-Küöl in Yakutia and the westernmost one spoken in Kamchatka. The first dialect has been in contact with Yakut for a long time, while the second has possibly been in contact with Koryak and Itelmen. The aim of the project is to discover differences between the two dialects and whether they stem from independent innovations or contact. For this, we use corpora of field recordings collected by Brigitta Pakendorf in the course of 2007-2012. In this talk we will describe the data, argue what differences can be found in them and what statistical methods can be used for this, and present some differences in morphology and syntax that have been found so far.

West Circassian and Kabardian languages represent a dialectal continuum spread in Krasnodar district, republics of Adygea, Karachai-Circassia and Kabardino-Balkaria. During the presentation, we are going to talk about phonetic and sociolinguistic features of different Circassian idioms, present a project of an atlas of Circassian isoglosses and show first maps, which the atlas will include. In addition, we will describe the process of creating a phonetic and grammatical questionnaire and the difficulties associated with that.

The study deals with the intonation patterns in three Non-Standard varieties of Russian. In the first part of the talk we discuss the methodological issues, such as analysis of pitch range, data filtering and data representation. In the second part, we consider a number of case studies, namely Daghestanian Russian, Southern Russian and Jewish Russian. The general goal of the project is to compile an annotated corpus of non-standard Russian with pitch annotation and explore the intonation patterns of non-standard varieties of Russian basing on corpus data.

The corpus of regional variants of Russian spoken in Daghestan is based on transcribed sociolinguistic interviews in Russian with speakers of various Daghestanian languages ​​who live in rural areas. Technically, the corpus is built using the platform and annotation principles developed for the dialectal corpus of Ustja River Basin. The aims of the project include both its maintenance and adding new texts, as well as the use of the corpus for systematic study of morphosyntactic characteristics of Daghestanian Russian. In the talk, we plan to discuss the current state of the corpus, the possibilities of corpus-based research, as well as the problems we met and the perspectives of the project.