The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus

Maria Polinsky

Nov 2020 · Oxford University Press

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The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus is an introduction to and overview of the linguistically diverse languages of southern Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Though the languages of the Caucasus have often been mischaracterized or exoticized, many of them have cross-linguistically rare features found in few or no other languages. This handbook presents facts and descriptions of the languages written by experts. The first half of the book is an introduction to the languages, with the linguistic profiles enriched by demographic research about their speakers. It features overviews of the main language families as well as detailed grammatical descriptions of several individual languages. The second half of the book delves more deeply into theoretical analyses of features, such as agreement, ellipsis, and discourse properties, which are found in some languages of the Caucasus. Promising areas for future research are highlighted throughout the handbook, which will be of interest to linguists of all subfields.

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Maria Polinsky is Professor of Linguistics and Associate Director of the Language Science Centre at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Heritage Languages and Their Speakers (2018), Deconstructing Ergativity (2016) and The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century (1996). She has done extensive primary work on several language families, in particular, on languages of the Caucasus: Nakh-Dagestanian, Norwest Caucasian, and Kartvelian. Her research emphasizes the importance of lesser-studied languages for theoretical linguistics.