International Summer School on
Language Documentation and Description

School of Oriental and African Studies, London

22 June - 3 July 2009

Caucasian languages

This course will consist of an introduction to the languages spoken in the Caucasus (location, genetic affiliation, socio-political status, and typological particularities), followed by a presentation of the most salient typological features of the languages belonging to each of the three families the members of which are located exclusively in the Caucasus: Kartvelian (or South Caucasian), Abkhazo-Adyghian (or North West Caucasian), and Nakh-Daghestanian (or North East Caucasian). For each family, after a general overview of phonology, morphology, and syntax, a particular attention will be given to the encoding of the core syntactic roles A(gent), P(atient), and S(ole argument of monovalent verbs). In spite of the fact that ergative features are present in some way or other in the core syntactic role coding system of all Caucasian languages, important variations can be observed in the way the systems of individual languages organize the case marking of NPs representing core arguments and the indexation of core arguments in verb forms.