External agreement

In languages like English, the form of a verb is dependent on the properties of the subject. For instance, we say 'My brother laughs at these photographs' but 'My brothers laugh at these photographs'. The mechanism which provides the correct form of the verb is called agreement: in these sentences the verb agrees with the subject, and the difference in the form of the verb ('laughs' vs. 'laugh') is determined by the fact that the subject in one sentence is third person singular ('My brother') whereas in the other it is third person plural ('My brothers'). The agreement between a verb and its arguments is a familiar and cross-linguistically frequent phenomenon, considered by many linguists, of different theoretical persuasions, to be at the core of language.

Another type of agreement familiar from English, is the agreement between a noun and its modifier: in the examples above 'these' agrees with 'photographs' in plural number (compare the singular alternative 'this photograph'). Since the controller of the agreement, 'photographs' is plural in both sentences, it is not surprising that the form of the demonstrative also plural.

While verbs, adjectives, and demonstratives agree in many languages, a situation in which a preposition (such as 'at' in the examples above) would change in any way is rather unusual. Still, there are languages, such as Welsh and Breton, where the form of a preposition changes depending on the grammatical properties of the noun it introduces.

A situation where the form of a preposition would change depending on the properties of the subject, as verbs do in English, and not with the noun it introduces as in Welsh, is so rare that it until now has escaped linguistic analysis altogether. To give an illustration: if in the example sentences above the preposition 'at' had to appear in two forms: one in accordance with the singular number of the subject 'my brother' and another in accordance with the plural number, 'my brothers', we would consider this to be a very unusual agreement pattern. This type of agreement does not respect the existing syntactic grouping in a sentence but connects elements which belong to different syntactic phrases (such as 'my brother' and 'at'). We call this pattern "external agreement". External agreement challenges existing syntactic models: all current approaches define agreement as a local syntactic relation, i.e. occurring within clear syntactic domain such as verb phrase, noun phrase, prepositional phrase, etc.

External agreement, being extremely rare typologically, appears with fascinating regularity in languages of the Nakh-Daghestanian family spoken in the Caucasus: there are 17 languages with diachronically unrelated instances of external agreement. Such an abundance of examples appearing in languages with considerable variation in their syntactic systems makes external agreement in Nakh-Daghestanian an ideal opportunity for research into morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic mechanisms which regulate not only agreement, a fundamental part of a grammar of many languages, but also the less obvious relationships between syntactic elements in a sentence.

Our previous work on agreement gives us the theoretical apparatus necessary for accounting for this challenging phenomenon. Our typological work makes us aware of the range of morphological and syntactic possibilities in agreement systems. Finally, our expertise in Nakh-Daghestanian languages in general enables us to go straight into the intricacies of external agreement patterns.

Our project will (i) investigate the phenomenon of external agreement from a theoretical perspective; (ii) collect new data from little studied and/or endangered languages; (iii) compile a database and make it fully available for public online use; and (iv) publish a book and articles on the significance of our findings for current theories of grammar.

The core activities carried out for this research constitute theoretical work which has its major impact within syntactic and morphological theory and Caucasian studies. While linguistic research of this kind makes a long-term contribution to a knowledge base that influences developments in social and commercial applications, we have identified two key communities beyond our narrow academic environment where impact will be more immediate. The two impact-beneficiary groups can be identified as:

(i) The native speaker communities of two small endangered/underdescribed languages of Daghestan: Andi (5,800 speakers) and Rutul (around 30,000 speakers).

Although a grammatical description of Andi exists, (Tsertsvadze, 1961, in Georgian), there is no grammar of Rutul, and there is no culturally significant language material for these two largely unwritten languages (no published texts or online recordings and the materials available to speakers are extremely limited).

Recent migration to big cities has had a devastating impact on linguistic and cultural diversity in Daghestan. The low social status of minority languages has caused language transmission to children to decline. Many small Daghestanian languages are not officially recognised, and people perceive them as 'dialects' with low prestige. However, our experience of working with the endangered Archi language spoken in the highlands of Daghestan proved that interest on the international level can change the attitude of the speakers considerably: after 12 years of our work, the presence of Archi in both official and social media rose dramatically: several websites created for the Archi village use our materials. Hard copies of the Archi dictionary (Chumakina et al, 2007), printed specifically for the community, have been warmly welcomed by Archi people, especially those who now live outside the Archi village. Archi language and culture has become more visible in the Daghestanian context and people now are less reluctant to claim their identity as Archi.

The data from Andi and Rutul, the focus languages of this project, will constitute a significant part of the database on external agreement, and we will publish the source data (annotated audio and video materials) online. The potential impact will therefore be a natural result of our academic activities: we will demonstrate to the speakers how highly we value their language, which will help to increase their willingness to pass the languages to younger generations. In addition to this, we will publish a booklet for each language with parallel texts: (a) a myth-like story on the origin of the people, (b) a recipe of a characteristic local food and (c) a collection of folk songs and poems. The materials will be published in a Cyrillic based orthography with Russian translations and colour photographs taken on site. This will demonstrate to the speakers that their languages, however small, are highly valuable on the international level. We will also make these booklets available online.

(ii) Members of the public who have an active interest in languages and/or socio-cultural diversity in general, particularly in issues surrounding language endangerment.

Our work will enhance the general knowledge and appreciation of endangered languages and cultures, bring largely unknown linguistic and cultural traditions to greater public attention, and provide better understanding of the factors that threaten and sustain languages. This will be achieved in part through our participation in large scale public outreach activities organised by the University of Surrey. These popular events - aimed at the general public - are widely publicised and have been well attended by the local community; at the recent Festival of Wonder in Guildford, demand for tickets outstripped the 9000 places available.