Gilles Authier

Thanks to the discovery in Mount Sinai Monastery of the Albanian palimpsest, which contains fragments of the Bible in an ancient form of Udi, this language has become the earliest attested member of the East Caucasian family. However, due to its long evolution in contact with unrelated languages, both old and modern Udi show many characteristics unknown to their closest relatives, including Differential Object Marking. Combined with ergative case marking, this feature results in a rare 'tripartite alignment'. After describing the case marking of arguments in Lezgian, modern dialects of Udi and the three non-East Caucasian languages of the area (Tat, Azeri and Armenian) showing Differential Object Marking, we examine the available Old Udi / Caucasian Albanian data, compare them with data from Old Armenian, Old Turkic and Middle Iranian, and try to assess the best candidate for the source of the Udi phenomenon in the light of what is known about its history in terms of contact and sociolinguistic dominance.

Archi is a one-village language (1,000 speakers) belonging to the Lezgic branch of East Caucasian. It has a large and productive class of compound verbs combining a light verb and 'coverbs' of nominal, adjectival, verbal or unknown origin. It stands out among its closest relatives in the way it has created, under the impulse of Lak, a large class of compounds using the verb bos 'say'. We consider all coverbs used with bos and its allomorphs to be ideophones and propose a semantic classification of all ideophonic verbal compounds: sound and speech verbs, verbs of non-auditory sensations, ingestion, movement, and effort-demanding activities. All primary data were extracted with partial paradigms and some examples from Chumakina et al.'s Archi online dictionary. Their phonotactic shapes, not substantially different from other parts of speech, are examined, as well as borrowings and specific 'children speech' ideophones. East Caucasian, Archi, compound verbs, ideophones

This collection of papers deals with the morphosyntax of verbal categories in a broad sample of languages spoken in the Eastern Caucasus. Most of these languages are genetically related and belong to the East Caucasian (alias Nakh-Daghestanian) family, but similarities with surrounding Turkic or North-West Caucasian languages are also touched upon in some of the contributions. MARINA CHUMAKINA's paper "Morphological complexity of Archi verbs" offers a typical example, based on a single and very small, but well studied language, of how verbal forms are built in most East Caucasian languages; TIMUR MAISAK's contribution then studies the present and the future forms within the Lezgic tense and aspect systems focussing on one branch of the family, while a paper by GILLES AUTHIER "From adlocative case to debitive mood without desubordination in Budugh and Kryz" zooms on an understudied sub-branch to address a current debate on morpheme polycategoriality. NINA ...

Probably the majority of languages display differen t adnominal possessive constructions, hereafter called “genitive splits” d etermined by parameters such as the type of possessum, the type of the poss essor and the type of the relation between both (see Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2003; Lander 2009). However, such oppositions are only very rarely conv eyed by contrasting different genitive exponents. Rather, these splits usually involve variations in locus, i.e. the participant associated morphosyn tactically with possessive marking are expressed by oppositions between the ge nitive and other constructions. A genitive morpheme or adposition is as ociated with the possessor (dependent-marking), and / or a possessiv e marker is found on the possessum (head-marking). The most common split triggering morphosyntactic di fferences in possessive NPs is between different kinds of posses sors. The use of a genitive marker is restricted to certain classes of n minals (animacy factor), or, more broadl...

This paper deals with the detransitive voice in Kry z, an unwritten language belonging to the Lezgic branch of the North-East Ca ucasian family. Nowadays three dialects of Kryz (Kryz proper, Jek, and Alik-Khaput) are spoken as a first language by at most 2000 speakers in fewer than ten localities of north-eastern Azerbaijan. Despite gen eralized bilingualism in Azerbaijani, Kryz preserves typical Proto-Lezgic fe atures. In particular, gender-number agreement with S/P (Single argument o r Patient) nouns is preor infixed to the lexical stems of simple verb s, which form a closed class. Person is expressed by free pronouns. Word o rder is strictly possessor-possessed, adjective-noun, and basically Agent-Patient-Verb; case marking and cross-referencing on the verb is g enerally ergative. Valency increase is expressed periphrastically, usi ng auxiliaries (‘do’ or ‘give’). The Kryz detransitive synthetic voice, to be described in this paper, is an unexpected singularity within Lezgic 3 an...

In Budugh, a small Daghestanian language spoken in Azerbaijan, verb-stems, defined as verb forms uninflected for tense or mood, can be used either as dependent of nouns (‘participles’) and other predicates (verbal nouns or hereafter ‘masdars’, and ‘sequential converbs’) or as finite non-indicative verb forms, that is with modal use, especially in a variety of injunctive nuances. The main distinction between dependent and independent uses is prosodic: dependent verb forms adopt the prosodic features of nouns, while the same forms, if syntactically independent, share the same prosodic pattern as other indicative or more complex modal forms which are segmentally marked (suffixed) as such.

A finite modal form with debitive meaning is found in both Kryz and Budugh, most often ending in -u which seems to be the nominal adlocative case marker. Budugh uses the same form as a nominalized, non finite form, while Kryz does not. This seems to indicate that the grammaticalization process by which a case, when added to a verb stem, may come to express modality, does not necessarily imply a nominalized stage followed by desubordination.

This volume is a collection of articles concerned with the typology of valency and valence change in a large and diversified sample of languages that display ergative alignment in their grammar. The sample of languages represented in these descriptive contributions covers most of the geographical areas and linguistic families in which ergativity has been known to exist jointly with well-developed morphological voice, and some languages belonging to families in which ergativity or voice were not previously recognized or adequately described up to now.

Personal pronouns are among the most stable lexemes in the East Caucasian family, which consists of at least forty different languages distributed over eight well established branches, with nevertheless important variations and paradigmatic reshaping across branches, languages, and even dialects. The 1st and 2nd singular pronouns have been replaced or changed shape at least once in many subparts of the family, and the main 1st person singular innovation was apparently followed by areal spread. Most languages retain two different pronouns for the 1st person plural European pronoun, but the cognates are not always clear, suggesting that although clusivity is an inherited feature of East Caucasian pronominal paradigms, its history is complex, with various types of loss and renewal. This paper attempts to draw a fine-grained and accurate picture of these 1st person plural pronouns and their history within the larger setting of personal pronouns in general. Most individual stories behind variation across branches, languages and dialects provide reasons to see inclusive pronouns as prone to be maintained or renewed over time, whereas exclusive pronouns (1st person singular or plural) are specially targeted by avoidance and replacement processes.

The paper deals with the copying of morphemes and patterns from Turkic into the morphology of Kryz, an East Caucasian language of northern Azerbaijan. The copied morphemes in question are clitics found in the periphery of the verb system (expressing evidentiality, indefiniteness) and valency–changing morphology imported globally together with Azeri forms, as well as adjective-forming derivational suffixes. The copied structures are more diverse, and have left a mark on many areas of the morphology, in both verb and noun phrases.