Dr. Sven Grawunder
Guest of the GRK in 2010
Glottalization in the languages of the Caucasus and Transcausus
Towards model of frequency and gradience of a feature in language contact situations
Abstract | Although grounded in areal typology this project looks at the relation of frequency of occurrence and areal distribution of (phonetic) features, specifically in the languages of the Caucasus. On the one hand, the project aims to explain the motivation for sound change within a defined geographical area, focussing on phenomena which are relatively easy to describe, e.g. the glottalization of obstruent consonants, i.e. glottalic stops or ejectives. On the other hand, the Caucasus and the surrounding region is an area of historical multilingual contact of languages of at least six different families, including Kartvelian, Nakh-Daghestanian, Adyghe-Abkhaz, Semitic, Altaic and two Indo-European genera. In so far this project is also fed by theories about language contact (e.g. Thomason, 2001) and dialectology (e.g. Labov, 2001). Stilo (2006) has described a transitional zone in the Transcaucasus involving a number of morpho-syntactic, phonological and lexical features in his Atlas of the Araxes Area. In the present project, as in the approaches of Stilo (1994; 2004; 2006) and Fallon (2001), though diachronic relations will not be neglected, the primary focus will be on the description of the individual varieties and areal distribution in synchronic terms. |
Disciplin | Linguistics |
Languages | South Caucasian (Georgian, Svan), Northest Caucasian (Tsez, Bezhta, Avar), Turkic (Kumyk) , Indoeuropean (Armenian, Ossetian) |
Research Direction | language contact, areal typology, dialectology, phonetics, phonology |
Keywords | modeling language contact |