Extended Exponence in Cross-Linguistic Perspective

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In Batsbi, a language of the Nakh group of the Nakh-Daghestanian language family, markers of gender-number agreement can occur simultaneously in several positions in a single verb form. Repetition of markers in this way has been called extended exponence. Until recently, it was widely believed that inflection, such as the gender-number agreement marker, was necessarily restricted to the edges of words, and that no language had repeated marking of agreement with a particular feature or set of features. However, such repetition is found in several of the languages of the Nakh-Daghestanian family, as well as in several in the Kiranti subgroup of Tibeto-Burman, and in other languages. The repetition of gender- number encoding raises questions of typological distribution (for example, do such patterns occur only in languages of certain types?), diachronic origin (how and why do such patterns originate?), and linguistic theory (how can we account for systems of this type?). The goals of this research include (a) characterization of variation possible in the pattern cross-linguistically, (b) a statement of constraints on the pattern, if any, and (c) a description of the origins of these patterns in the languages studied. One impact of this project will be in enhancing the status of the endangered languages to be studied, thus encouraging speakers to preserve them. The project provides support for linguistics and other academic fields in the Republic of Azerbaijan and in Daghestan, Russia. Collecting texts in Archi and Khinalug will lay the foundation for editing these texts in the future as a contribution to the documentation of these endangered languages