Information Structure in Languages of the Caucasus

This chapter discusses the expression of information structure in the three indigenous language families of the Caucasus with a focus on constituent order and particles. At the clause level, all three language families show a clear preference for SOV, are generally flexible, and also admit other orders. The major focus position is pre-verbal, but postverbal focus is also attested; adjacency to the verb is a violable constraint. At the phrasal level, there is a sharp difference between Northwest Caucasian, with its prenominal and postnominal modifiers alike, and Kartvelian and Nakh-Daghestanian languages, which employ postnominal modifiers only for emphasis, contrast, or focus. Languages from all three families make wide use of cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions that normally express constituent focus. Another commonality is the frequent use of enclitics and suffixes of different types for information-structuring purposes. Modal markers, interrogative markers, additive affixes, and markers with grammatical meaning are used as focus-sensitive particles and usually placed after the item they scope over or after the head of the phrase.

Segmental Phonetics and Phonology in Caucasian languages

This chapter surveys the major topics of Caucasian segmental phonetics and phonology, focusing on topics with broader implications for general phonetic and phonological theory. The author first presents an acoustic phonetic analysis of phonemic inventories in the three Caucasian families, including both a review of recent instrumental data on the topic as well as a new analysis of new and existing experimental acoustic data. This analysis focuses on four primary topics: obstruents with different laryngeal features, typologically unusual segments, small vocalic inventories, and pharyngealization. The new acoustic data from a nonce-word experiment in Georgian and Megrelian offer evidence that aspiration in voiceless stops gradually, yet significantly shortens if another voiceless stop precedes the relevant one in a given word. The second part reviews analyses of Caucasian phonotactics, primarily of South Caucasian consonant clusters that play a crucial role in discussions on production versus perception in phonology. The chapter concludes with a collection of phonological alternations that have potential for future research on phonology.

Word Stress in Languages of the Caucasus

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the stress systems in Abkhaz-Adyghean/North-West Caucasian, Nakh-Dagestanian/North-East Caucasian, and Kartvelian/South-Caucasian languages, as well as the larger Indo-European languages of the area, Ossetic (Iron and Digoron) and Armenian. First, it addresses the so-called free stress languages, in which stress placement is not restricted to particular syllables/syllable types or morphemes, and the fixed stress languages, in which stress always targets a syllable in a certain position, counting from the left or right edge of a word. Next, quantity-sensitive stress systems are considered, in which stress is found on the heavier syllable within a given domain, such as a whole word or a part of it (a so-called stress window). Further, the chapter discusses languages in which stress assignment is morphologically conditioned. After the chapter introduces this classification of stress systems, it addresses the more complex cases that do not (fully) fit into it, notably the stress systems of Abkhaz-Adyghean and some of the Nakh-Dagestanian languages. Finally, the chapter considers underdescribed stress systems and languages for which conflicting descriptions have been proposed. The chapter closes with an overview of the available instrumental studies. Overall, the aim of the current chapter is to highlight the impressive diversity that the languages of the Caucasus exhibit in the realm of word stress and emphasize the need for further research in the area, both instrumental and theoretical.

The Northwest Caucasian Languages

This chapter describes the major features of the Northwest Caucasian (Abkhaz-Adyghe) language family, comprising Abkhaz, Abaza, West Circassian (Adyghe), East Circassian (Kabardian), and the now extinct Ubykh. Starting with the sociolinguistic setting of the Northwest Caucasian varieties and the history of linguistic research on them, the discussion then proceeds to a description of the most important features of their phonology, morphology, and syntax, concluding with a brief discussion of a number of typologically outstanding features. The chapter, based both on published sources and the authors’ fieldwork data, covers issues such as exuberant consonantism, lexical category underspecification, polysynthetic morphology, expression of spatial meanings in the verb, rich systems of tense, aspect and mood categories, finite and non-finite verbal forms, non-trivial noun phrase syntax, relativization, and complexities of clause-combining. Besides describing the features common for all the languages of the family, we focus on important points of variation among the Northwest Caucasian languages and their dialects, aiming at an adequate representation of the wealth of phenomena they present and highlighting the challenges they offer for typology and linguistic theory.

Nakh-Dagestanian Languages

The chapter is a survey of the Nakh-Daghestanian family (also known as East Caucasian), one of the indigenous language families spoken in the Caucasus. The family comprises more than 30 languages, some of which are spoken by only a few hundred people and remain unwritten and/or underdescribed. The chapter provides general information about the sociolinguistic status of Nakh-Daghestanian languages and the history of their research as well as their phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. The languages of the family have rich consonant systems and are morphologically ergative, head-final, with rich case systems, complex verbal paradigms, and pervasive gender-number agreement. Alongside the major transitive and intransitive lexical verb classes, verbs of perception and cognition with the dative experiencer subject usually comprise one or more minor valency classes with non-canonically marked subjects. Among valency-increasing derivations, the causative is the most prominent. The most typical subordination strategies are non-finite, making use of participles, converbs, infinitives and verbal nouns.

Megrelian

This chapter addresses Megrelian, a Kartvelian (South Caucasian) language spoken by Megrelians, a subethnic group compactly residing in one of the western provinces of Georgia, Samegrelo. A language of informal communication, Megrelian has been subject to linguistic research both in Georgia and beyond for more than two hundred years. Backed by the existing literature on the language, most of which has been published in Georgian, this sketch provides an account of essential features of Megrelian phonology, grammar, and lexicon, including such typologically renowned properties of Megrelian as the elaborate system of preverbs and innovative and extremely specific case-marking alignment that not only features ergative stimuli of affective verbs, but can also license this case to adverbs as well. Furthermore, new insights are proposed for such domains of linguistic structure as the language’s case system, grades of comparison, expression of spatial deixis by pronominal expressions, verbal aspect, and evidentiality; some of these statements are based on the data from the author’s long-term fieldwork and are now being introduced to linguistic discourse.

Languages and Sociolinguistics of the Caucasus

This chapter provides a sociolinguistic account of the languages of the Caucasus, including figures for speakers and their geographical distribution, language vitality, the official status of the languages, orthography, and writing practices. The chapter discusses language repertoires typical of different areas in the Caucasus, and their change over the 20th century. As a showcase, it provides an overview of traditional multilingualism in Daghestan, the most linguistically dense are in the Caucasus. It discusses various patterns of interethnic communication, including lingua franca and asymmetrical bilingualism. We show that bilingualism was gendered, and how Russian was spreading in the area as a new lingua franca. The chapter surveys the outcomes of language contact, covering both lexical borrowing (including main references to etymological research) and providing examples of structural convergence, with a special focus on the area of the highest language density in the Caucasus, Dagestan. Data in the chapter are based both on official sources (censuses), on information provided by experts and on the authors’ own work in the field.

Iron Ossetic

Iron Ossetic is an Iranian language spoken in the Caucasus. The present chapter describes the main phonological, morphological, and syntactic properties of Iron Ossetic. A brief overview is given of the geographical and historical background, published sources, and history of research on Ossetic. The chapter proceeds with an overview of phonetics and phonology of the language, after which the morphology of nominals and verbs is addressed. The discussion of syntax touches upon the overall structure of simple clauses, the structure of noun phrases, valency classes, interrogative clauses, and complex clauses. A special emphasis is put on typologically unusual properties of this language. These properties include a rich system of second position pronominal clitics with a complex pattern of placement, the behavior of negation and negative indefinites, the syntax of wh-questions and complementizers, and the formation of finite embedded clauses, including relative clauses. Relative clause functions are always expressed by correlatives.

Kartvelian (South Caucasian) Languages

The chapter contains a description of the small Kartvelian, or South Caucasian, language family spoken in the Western part of Transcaucasia and consisting of four languages of which Georgian is the most known and culturally significant. It outlines the structure of the family and the problem of its further genetic affiliation and contains sociolinguistic information, history of its research, basic characteristics of phonology, including a rich consonantal system with unusual consonant clusters, lexical classes, morphology of nominals and verbs, with special emphasis on complexity of the verb and the syntactically motivated morphological classes and processes like valency-changing derivation (benefactive, causative), structure of noun phrases and the role of case marking, simple clause, word order, anaphora, complex sentence, and the role of the three major grammatical relations: Subject, Direct Object, and Indirect Object that dominate in the morphology and syntax; the areal and typological profile of the Kartvelian languages; and issues for further research.

Ergativity in the Caucasus

This chapter provides an overview of ergativity-related phenomena in the languages of the Caucasus, a geographical region with a high concentration of ergative languages. The chapter reviews the morphologically ergative nature of the languages, revealed in case marking and gender agreement in Nakh-Daghestanian as well as person marking in Northwest Caucasian. No manifestation of syntactic ergativity is observed in languages of the Caucasus, with the exception of relativization in Circassian. It also reviews ergative splits observed in the Caucasus and describes attested patterns of split subject case marking in intransitive clauses. Finally, various properties usually thought to attest to the inherent or structural nature of ergative arguments are discussed: theta-relatedness, behavior in subject-to-subject raising, ability to participate in hierarchical agreement, the DP versus PP distinction, the structural locus of ergative case assignment, and some problems for configurational approaches to case assignment.