Evolution of grammar in East Caucasian: Grammaticalization of unusual patterns of number agreement

• Applicant: Dr. Michael Daniel, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 564661428

East Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian) languages have developed a very peculiar grammatical profile. This old and geographically compact family presents challenges not only to a typologically informed description of its unusual morphosyntactic properties but also to modeling their emergence and evolutionary paths. In language families whose daughters have been in constant contact for hundreds of years, as in East Caucasian, disentangling retention from shared non-inherited patterns resulting from structural convergence or independent parallel development remains a major problem for both diachronic typology and comparative linguistics. I explore one domain, agreement in number, focusing on three cross-linguistically unusual patterns, including agreement of plural personal pronouns, agreement of names of substances and suppletive number agreement in adjectives. The project will contribute both to the methodology of the study of evolution of grammar and to the morphosyntactic typology of agreement. The data for the project come from grammatical descriptions, dictionaries, corpora and the author’s personal fieldnotes and questionnaires collected to this day.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants