Andi project received grant funding from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research

On the eve of 2018, the Russian Foundation for Basic Research finished reviewing grant applications. Among the approved applications was the project "The Andi morphosyntax in a typological perspective", under the guidance of Michael Daniel; professor at the School of Linguistics and participant of the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory.

The three-year project aims to deepen the study of a number of phenomena in the grammar of Andi and compare them to closely related languages from a typological perspective. One of the focal points of the project, among other things, is the system of noun classes and class agreement, argument structure, the usage of cases and verb forms and the behavior of clitics.

The project will be carried out by Linguistic Convergence Laboratory participants and teachers of the School of Linguistics Timur Maisak and George Moroz and master students Aigul Zakirova and Alexandra Martynova. Other colleagues who could not be included in the application due to formal reasons, will also be involved in the project. For example, graduate student Samira Verhees from the Netherlands, who has been doing fieldwork in Daghestan for a few years already and has also worked on Andi, and Neige Rochant, master student from INALCO in Paris, who has been involved in several field expeditions to Andi villages.

The team already has done some work on the project. Employees and students from the School of Linguistics first got acquainted with Andi during an expedition to Daghestan in 2015. Andi belongs to the Avar-Andic branch of the Nakh Daghestanian language family and is spoken in the Botlikh region of Daghestan. Since 2015, trips to the Andi villages have become annual.

The support from the RFBR is a good incentive not only to continue the study of Andi, but also to turn this work into tangible results in the form of publications, conference talks and the development of databases with lexical material and texts.