On some grammatical features and the issue of the origin of personal markers in Dargwa

Nina Sumbatova (Russian State University for the Humanities, nina.sumbatova@gmail.com)

Journal of Language Relationship, № 5, 2011 - p.110-129

Abstract: Lak and Dargwa, unlike most other languages of the Nakh-Daghestanian language family, are characterized by relatively complex systems of personal agreement with several heterogeneous sets of person markers. A part of these markers developed out of personal pronouns (Troubetzkoy 1929; Nikolayev and Starostin 1994), which are known as the most typical source of person agreement cross-linguistically. However, the origin of most person markers in Lak and Dargwa is still unknown. This paper treats some grammatical properties of personal agreement in different dialects of Dargwa, including the morphology of person marking, the type of personal opposition observed in each dialect, the rules of agreement control and the type of personal hierarchy realized in each dialect. In Dargwa, two basic tendencies of person ranking are observed: some dialects (especially those located in the North of the Dargwa-speaking area) invariably place the first and second person on the same hierarchy level; other dialects (especially those located in the South and South-West) give preference to the second person. The synchronic properties of personal agreement in Dargwa help to arrive at a suggestion concerning the origin of the highly untypical personal opposition observed in most TAM paradigms of Dargwa where the second person singular forms are opposed to the forms covering the first person (singular and plural) and the second person plural (2SG vs. 1SG & 1PL & 2PL). This hypothesis explains this paradigm structure as a result of the grammaticalization of an allocutive clitic marking the plural addressee.

Keywords: Nakh-Daghestanian languages, Dargwa (Dargi), person agreement, agreement control, person hierarchy, allocutive marker

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