Linguistic Typology 2019; 23(1): 59–106 Diana Forker Elevation as a category of grammar: Sanzhi Dargwa and beyond https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2019-0001 Received May 11, 2018; revised August 20, 2018 Abstract: Nakh-Daghestanian languages have encountered growing interest from typologists and linguists from other subdiscplines, and more and more languages from the Nakh-Daghestanian language family are being studied. This paper provides a grammatical overview of the hitherto undescribed Sanzhi Dargwa language, followed by a detailed analysis of the grammaticalized expression of spatial elevation in Sanzhi. Spatial elevation, a topic that has not received substantial attention in Caucasian linguistics, manifests itself across different parts of speech in Sanzhi Dargwa and related languages. In Sanzhi, elevation is a deictic category in partial opposition with participant- oriented deixis/horizontally-oriented directional deixis. This paper treats the spatial uses of demonstratives, spatial preverbs and spatial cases that express elevation as well as the semantic extension of this spatial category into other, non-spatial domains. It further compares the Sanzhi data to other Caucasian and non-Caucasian languages and makes suggestions for investigating elevation as a subcategory within a broader category of topographical deixis. Keywords: Sanzhi Dargwa, Nakh-Daghestanian languages, elevation, deixis, demonstratives, spatial cases, spatial preverbs 1 Introduction Interest in Nakh-Daghestanian languages in typology and in other linguistic subdisciplines has grown rapidly in recent years, with an active community of linguists from Russia and other countries. The goal of the present paper is to pour more oil into this fire and perhaps to entice new generations of scholars to join the throng. The Caucasus is an ideal place for field work. It is relatively easily accessible, with hospitable people, beautiful landscapes, and tasty food, and it is a true cornucopia of fascinating languages (see Sumbatova 2018; Daniel & Dobrushina 2018 for fieldwork memories from the Caucasus). Diana Forker [di̯ˈaːna ˈfɔʁkɐ], Fachbereich Kaukasiologie, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Jenergasse 8 (Acchouchierhaus), 07743 Jena, Deutschland, E-mail: [email protected] 60 Diana Forker In this paper, I focus on the previously undescribed Nakh-Daghestanian language Sanzhi Dargwa. After an introduction to the grammar of Sanzhi I focus the analysis on the grammaticalized expression of elevation, a category that has received comparatively little interest within the broader field of the linguistic expression of space. A number of the features found in Nakh-Daghestanian languages have received a lot of attention in cross-linguistic research, for instance agreement, alignment, evidentiality, and also spatial cases. But other features are much less familiar to outsiders, including elevation. In Sanzhi, elevation is a deictic category that is in pragmatic opposition with participant-oriented deixis and horizontally-oriented directional deixis unmarked for elevation. Elevation is conveyed through spatial adverbials, postpositions and nouns, but is also a semantic feature of demonstratives, spatial preverbs and, to a limited extent, spatial cases. As will be shown in the paper, elevation is a pervasive and characteristic trait in the grammar of Sanzhi Dargwa. I compare the Sanzhi data both to other related languages and to unrelated languages from the Caucasus and from elsewhere, and I propose possible directions for further research. My aim is not to provide a neat and complete analysis, but to highlight challenges and draw attention to open questions that can best be approached from a comparative perspective. The structure of the paper is as follows: Section 2 provides a brief introduc- tion to the grammar of Sanzhi Dargwa. Section 3 is devoted to the main topic of the paper, the expression of elevation in Sanzhi through demonstratives, pre- verbs and cases. It also provides information about other Nakh-Daghestanian languages. In Section 4 I look at grammaticalized elevation from a cross-linguis- tic perspective. Section 5 briefly discusses elevation as a subcategory of topo- graphic deixis, and Section 6 is the conclusion. 2 The grammar of Sanzhi in a nutshell Sanzhi Dargwa belongs to the Dargwa (Dargi)1 languages (ISO dar; Glottocode darg1242) which form a subgroup of the Nakh-Daghestanian language family (Figure 1). More precisely, Sanzhi Dargwa is a South Dargwa variety, and is closely related to Icari Dargwa (Sumbatova & Mutalov 2003). Sanzhi Dargwa is spoken by approximately 250 speakers and is severely endangered. The self-designation 1 There is no homogenous English terminology referring to Dargwa languages, dialects, peo- ples, etc., rather there are several terms (Dargwa, Dargva, Dargi, Darginski). Elevation as a category of grammar 61 Nakh branch Chechen, Ingush, Tsova-Tush (Batsbi) Avar-Andic subbranch Avar Andic Andi, Botlikh, Godoberi, Karata, Akhvakh, Bagvalal, Tindi, Chamalal Tsezic subbranch Tsez, Hinuq, Khwarshi, Bezhta, Hunzib Dargwa subbranch Akusha/Standard Dargwa, Urakhi, Mugi, Tsudakhar, Gapshima-Butri, Mjurego-Gubden, Kadar, Muiri, Mehweb, Sirkhi, Amukh-Khuduc, Shiri, Qunqi, Icari, Sanzhi, Chirag, Kajtag, Kubachi Lak Khinalug Lezgic subbranch Udi, Archi, Lezgian, Agul, Tabasaran, Tsakhur, Rutul, Kryz, Budugh Figure 1: A family tree of Nakh-Daghestanian (following Kibrik 1996: xi). of the Sanzhi people is sunglan-te (Sanzhi.person-PL) and the language is called sunglan ʁaj (Sanzhi.person language). More than 40 years ago all Sanzhi speakers left the village of Sanzhi in central Daghestan. Today, the majority of Sanzhi speakers live in the village of Druzhba in the Daghestanian lowlands (Figure 2) and the remainder in other settlements in Daghestan and other parts of Russia. In this paper, I use the word Sanzhi as a shorthand for Sanzhi Dargwa to refer to the language. Sanzhi is currently being documented within the project, Documenting Dargi languages in Daghestan - Shiri and Sanzhi, funded by the DoBeS program. The project is run by three linguists (Diana Forker, Rasul Mutalov, Oleg Belyaev) and one anthropologist (Iwona Kaliszewska). Detailed information about the project, the languages and many texts, recordings and pictures can be found on the project website.2 All materials gathered in the project are accessible upon regis- tration via the Language Archive hosted by the Max Planck Institute Nijmegen.3 A subcorpus of 45.000 tokens has been fully glossed with FLEx and translated into Russian and English.4 All non-elicited examples used in this paper originate from this corpus. The electronic dictionary of Sanzhi was built up with Lexique Pro and a preliminary version is accessible via the project homepage.5 The current version contains more than 6,000 entries including audio recordings of most entries. 2 http://www.kaukaz.net/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/english/dargwa 3 http://dobes.mpi.nl/projects/shiri_sanzhi/ 4 http://web-corpora.net/SanzhiDargwaCorpus/search/?interface_language=ru 5 http://www.kaukaz.net/dargwa/sanzhi/lexicon/index.htm 62 Diana Forker Figure 2: Nakh-Daghestanian languages and the location of the villages of Sanzhi and Druzhba (map courtesy of Yuri Koryakov). Sanzhi Dargwa is structurally similar to other Nakh-Daghestanian languages, in particular Dargwa languages. It has a relatively large consonant inventory includ- ing pharyngeal and ejective consonants. All voiceless non-ejective obstruents except for pharyngeal/epiglottal and glottal segments occur as lax and tense (geminates) consonants, and even a number of labialized consonants can be tense. Sanzhi has four plain vowels and three pharyngealized vowels of which one (iˁ) is very rare and its phonemic status needs further clarification. The minimal syllable consists of a single vowel. Initial vowels are always preceded by a non-phonemic glottal stop not indicated in the orthography. The syllables in monomorphemic native words are V, VC, VCC, CV, CVC and CVCC. In other words, syllables never have complex onsets, but can have complex codas. Sanzhi morphology is concatenative and mainly suffixing. The language exhi- bits a mixture of dependent-marking in the form of a rich case inventory and head- marking in the form of verbal agreement. The grammatical cases of Sanzhi are ergative, absolutive, dative, and genitive. In addition, there is a plethora of spatial cases (Section 3.4, Table 4). Elevation within the system of spatial cases in Sanzhi Dargwa and other (Dargwa) languages is the topic of Section 3.4. Elevation as a category of grammar 63 The morphological make-up of verbs in Sanzhi is fairly complex. There are up to five morphemes that can precede the root and up to five that can follow it. Preverbs, among which spatial preverbs are a major subcategory, are extensively used to form verbal lexemes. Spatial preverbs with elevational meaning are discussed in Section 3.3. The vast majority of simple underived verbal stems come in pairs that express an aspectual opposition between perfective and imperfective. Furthermore, inflection conflates tense/aspect/mood/evidentiality in a rich array of synthetic and analytic verb forms. With respect to aspect, the two systems (i.e. aspectual stems and inflection) are formally independent and thus combine, which leads to intriguing interactions and to restrictions on which aspectual stem can inflect for which verb form. As a result, most inflectional verb forms can be built only from the imperfective stem or only from