Workshop: Grammars in contact in the Caucasus

Fri Oct 26 17:28:46 UTC 2012

Dear colleagues,

Apologies for any duplications -- this was posted earlier but not all of
us subscribers got it, so I'm reposting it just in case.  Abstracts
(including preliminary) are invited with a Nov. 5 deadline (see below).

Johanna Nichols

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Workshop on Grammars in Contact : Convergence and divergence in
languages of the Caucasus

Workshop to be proposed for the 46th Annual Meeting of the Societas
Linguistica Europaea

(Split, Croatia; Sept. 18-21, 2013)

Organizers : Gilles Authier, Oleg Belyaev, Ranko Matasovic, Johanna Nichols.

Contact Person: Oleg Belyaev (belyaev at iling-ran.ru)

Deadline for (preliminary) abstracts for this workshop: Nov. 5, 2012

Recent rapid progress in the description of previously poorly known
languages of the Caucasus, together with advances in linguistic
typology and studies on language contact, make it timely to reexamine
the traditional understanding of the Caucasus as a linguistic area. It
is now becoming clear that the typological diversity both within and
between the indigenous language families of the Caucasus is much
greater than what was traditionally assumed. There are few
pan-Caucasian typological features, but on the other hand there are
more local contact effects that define important subareas: Ossetic
(Iranian) is morphologically influenced by both West Caucasian and
Kartvelian while retaining its Iranian profile overall; Udi is a
full-fledged member of the Iran-Araxes area and shows such
un-Caucasian properties as DOM while retaining its Daghestanian
character overall; an Avar-Andic-Tsezic-Chechen-Ingush contact zone
straddles the deepest phylogenetic divide within Nakh-Daghestanian
without effacing that divide. In most cases the contact effects are
most visible in typological phenomena that have received adequate
description only in recent decades.

This workshop seeks to bring together work on typology, contact, and
historical linguistics in the Caucasus (or in general), dealing with
questions such as:

Diachronic accounts of contact patterns; ages of contact zones;

Sociolinguistics of local and regional contact in the Caucasus;

Shared but apparently not inherited properties within families or branches;

What typological properties have proven most resistant to contact effects ?

What typological properties have proven most prone to spread through
contact ?

Contact within and between language families;

Improved typological definitions of language family profiles;

Specific contact effects between specific languages;

Pan-Caucasus areal properties;

The Caucasus in relation to adjacent areas;

and other topics dealing with contact and diachrony, especially but
not exclusively in the Caucasus.

Abstracts: Please send abstracts of about 300 words, in English, and
including the author's name, affiliation and email, to Oleg Belyaev
(email address above).

Deadline: Monday, November 5, 2012. This will give us time to prepare
the final workshop proposal for the SLE's deadline of Nov. 15.

Some works that have figured in our understanding of these issues:

Aikhenvald, A. and Dixon, R. M. W. 2006. Grammars in Contact: A
Cross-Linguistic Typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Arkhangelskiy, Timofey & Oleg Belyaev. 2011. A Comparison of Eastern
Armenian and Iron Ossetic Spatial Systems. In: Vittorio S. Tomelleri,
Manana Topadze, Anna Lukianowicz (eds.). Languages and Cultures in the
Caucasus. München–Berlin: Verlag Otto Sagner, pp. 285–299.

Authier, Gilles & Timur Maisak (eds.). 2011. Tense, aspect, modality
and finiteness in East Caucasian languages. (Diversitas Linguarum,
30.) Bochum: Brockmeyer, 2011.

Authier, Gilles. 2010. Azeri morphology in Kryz (East Caucasian).
Turkic Languages 14.

Belyaev, Oleg. 2010. Evolution of Case in Ossetic. Iran and the
Caucasus 14:2, pp. 287–322.

Chirikba, Viacheslav A. 2008. The problem of the Caucasian Sprachbund.
In: Pieter Muysken (ed.). From linguistic areas to areal linguistics.
Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 25–94.

Heine, Bernd, and Tania Kuteva. 2005. Language contact and grammatical
change. Cambridge: CUP.

Hickey, Raymond (ed.).  2010. The handbook of language contact.
Oxford: Blackwell.

Johanson, Lars. 2006. Historical, cultural and linguistic aspects of
Turkic-Iranian contiguity. In: Lars Johanson & Christiane Bulut
(eds.). Turkic-Iranian contact areas. Historical and linguistic
aspects. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1–14.

Johanson, Lars. 2006. On the roles of Turkic in the Caucasus area. In:
April McMahon, Yaron Matras, Nigel Vincent (eds.). Linguistic areas.
London: Palgrave Macmillan , pp. 160–181.

Matasović, Ranko. 2012. Areal Typology of PIE: the case for Caucasian
Connections. Transactions of the Philological Society 110: 283–310.

Nichols, Johanna, and David A. Peterson. 2010. Contact-induced spread
of the rare Type 5 clitic. Presented at LSA Annual Meeting, Baltimore.

Stilo, Don. 2008. An introduction to the Araxes-Iran linguistic area.
http://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/events/deptseminars/02dec2008-an-introduction-to-the-araxes-iran-linguistic-area.html

Tuite, Kevin. 1999. The myth of the Caucasian Sprachbund: The case of
ergativity. Lingua 108, pp. 1–29.

--
Oleg Belyaev
Junior Researcher, Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of
Sciences
PhD student, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics,
Faculty of Philology, Moscow State University
Research Fellow, Institute for Modern Linguistic Research, Sholokhov
Moscow State University for the Humanities
http://ossetic-studies.org/obelyaev