The Mehweb language: Essays on phonology, morphology and syntax

Michael Daniel (ed), Nina Dobrushina (ed), Dmitry Ganenkov (ed)

Synopsis

This book is an investigation into the grammar of Mehweb (Dargwa, East Caucasian also known as Nakh-Daghestanian) based on several years of team fieldwork. Mehweb is spoken in one village community in Daghestan, Russia, with a population of some 800 people, In many ways, Mehweb is a typical East Caucasian language: it has a rich inventory of consonants; an extensive system of spatial forms in nouns and converbs and volitional forms in verbs; pervasive gender-number agreement; and ergative alignment in case marking and in gender agreement. It is also a typical language of the Dargwa branch, with symmetrical verb inflection in the imperfective and perfective paradigm and extensive use of spatial encoding for experiencers. Although Mehweb is clearly close to the northern varieties of Dargwa, it has been long isolated from the main body of Dargwa varieties by speakers of Avar and Lak. As a result of both independent internal evolution and contact with its neighbours, Mehweb developed some deviant properties, including accusatively aligned egophoric agreement, a split in the feminine class, and the typologically rare grammatical categories of verificative and apprehensive. But most importantly, Mehweb is where our friends live.

Chapters

  • Prefaces
    Michael Daniel, Nina Dobrushina
    Prefaces
  • The language and people of Mehweb
    Nina Dobrushina
    Chapter 1
  • Phonology of Mehweb
    George Moroz
    Chapter 2
  • Nominal morphology of Mehweb
    Ilya Chechuro
    Chapter 3
  • Mehweb verb morphology
    Michael Daniel
    Chapter 4
  • Moods of Mehweb
    Nina Dobrushina
    Chapter 5
  • Periphrastic causative constructions in Mehweb
    Daria Barylnikova
    Chapter 6
  • Case and agreement in Mehweb
    Dmitry Ganenkov
    Chapter 7
  • Specialized converbs in Mehweb
    Maria Sheyanova
    Chapter 8
  • General converbs in Mehweb
    Marina Kustova
    Chapter 9
  • The self-pronoun in Mehweb
    Aleksandra Kozhukhar
    Chapter 10
  • Relative clause and resumptive pronouns in Mehweb
    Yury Lander, Aleksandra Kozhukhar
    Chapter 11
  • The Mehweb “assertive” copula gwa: a sketch of a portrait
    Yury Lander
    Chapter 12
  • Maps of Mehweb
    Yuri Koryakov
    Chapter 13

Statistics

The Mehweb language: Essays on phonology, morphology and syntax

Biographies

Michael Daniel

Michael Daniel is a professor at School of Linguistics and a researcher at the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory, HSE (Moscow). He mostly worked on description and documentation of East Caucasian languages and on typology of nominal categories and morphosyntax and participated in various international typological projects such as WALS. Another domain of his interests is sociolinguistics of dialects and minority languages.

Nina Dobrushina

Nina Dobrushina is a researcher at the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory and a professor at School of Linguistics, HSE (Moscow). Her field experience is mostly with East Caucasian, including fine-grained analysis of modal categories in languages like Bagvalal, Cahur, Aghul, Mehweb, Rutul. She took part in international typological projects such as WALS. Another domain of her interests is sociolinguistics of dialects and minority languages, with a special focus on traditional multilingualism in small language communities.

Dmitry Ganenkov

Dmitry Ganenkov is a researcher at the University of Bamberg, Institute of Linguistics (Moscow) and the Laboratory of the Languages of the Caucasus at HSE (Moscow). His language expertise includes various East Caucasian languages of the Lezgic and Dargwa branches, especially Udi, Aghul and Chirag. He has vast experience in language documentation, the typology of expressing topological relations in East Caucasian and formal syntactic analysis of the data of East Caucasian, especially agreement and ergativity.

Daria Barylnikova

Daria Barylnikova was a student at School of Linguistics, HSE, from 2011 to 2017, first as BA and then as MA student. She has worked on a range of topics, including participial constructions in East Caucasian, periphrastic causativization, and constructional analysis of Russian.

Ilya Chechuro

Ilya Chechuro has been a student at School of Linguistics, HSE, from 2012 to 2018 and is now a doctoral student of the same programme and a researcher in Linguistic Convergence Laboratory. He has worked on East Caucasian languages, including spatial relations in the languages of the Dargwa branch and lexical contact in Northern Caucasus.

Yuri Koryakov

Yuri Koryakov is a senior researcher of the Institute of Linguistics, RAS, Moscow. His primary research interests include linguistic cartography, lexicostatistics and language classification. More specifically, he is carrying research on linguistic classification of the East Caucasian languages and other languages of the Caucasus.

Aleksandra Kozhukhar

Aleksandra Kozhukhar was a student at School of Linguistics, HSE, from 2011 to 2017, first as BA and then as MA student. She worked on a range of diverse linguistic topics, including WALS statistical analysis of language diversity, relativization in Mehweb and the typology and cartography of Mayan languages.

Marina Kustova

Marina Kustova has been a student at School of Linguistics, HSE, from 2013 to 2017 as BA student. She has been involved in various projects in computational linguistics. Her research on theoretical linguistics focused on lexical typology as well as on the typology of general converbs and their syntactic properties in Mehweb.

Yury Lander

Yury Lander is a professor at School of Linguistics, HSE (Moscow) and a research fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies (Moscow). His language expertise includes East and West Caucasian languages, including Udi, Dargwa, West Circassian, Kabardian, and Abaza as well as the typology of Austronesian languages. He has worked on various topics in syntactic and morphological typology, including relativization, possessive constructions, polysynthesis, head and dependent marking.

George Moroz

George Moroz is a researcher at the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory, HSE (Moscow). His research is focused on East and West Caucasian languages. His interests cover application of statistical analysis to linguistic data, linguistic cartography and phonetics.

Maria Sheyanova

Maria Sheyanova has been a student at School of Linguistics, HSE, from 2013 to the present, first as BA and then as MA student. She has been involved in various projects in computational linguistics and also has done research on special converbs in Mehweb and, more generally, in East Caucasian.

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Published

February 19, 2019
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Languages of the Caucasus

Online ISSN

2699-0156

Print ISSN

2699-0148
Cite as
Daniel, Michael, Dobrushina, Nina & Ganenkov, Dmitry (eds.). 2019. The Mehweb language: Essays on phonology, morphology and syntax. (Languages of the Caucasus 1). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3374730
Copyright (c) 2018 Language Science Press

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Details about the available publication format: PDF

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ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-96110-208-2

Publication date (01)

2019-10-23

doi

10.5281/zenodo.3374730

Details about the available publication format: Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-96110-209-9