The Project

IMMOCAL receives funding by Agence Nationale de la Recherche.
Project duration: 48 months
Project reference: ANR-16-CE27-0006

IMMOCAL focuses on linguistic typology and the documentation of understudied languages of the Caucasus. It consists of two complementary components:

  • collection, scientific editing and online publishing of narrative corpora of the oral tradition for nine languages, most of them endangered, belonging to three genetic stocks represented in the Caucasus, including (re-)publication of currently unavailable corpora and new collection in previously undocumented linguistic varieties;
  • the typological study of imperfective modalities by specialists of each language and sharing of results at scientific meetings, followed by dissemination and publication of the results, including input from other languages of the Caucasus, in a comprehensive overview of family-internal divergence and micro-areal convergence.

The sample of languages selected for the corpora is balanced: six East Caucasian, three Indo-European and one Kartvelian language.

The international team closely involves three doctoral students who will be supervised by the senior researchers, specialists of the domain. 36 months of postdoc positions will be funded by the project and awarded to young researchers specialising in the verbal morphology and semantics of Kaytag Dargi, Southern Lezgian, and Northern Talyshi. Targeted fieldwork on each of the selected languages will ensure accuracy in the editing, glossing, tagging and translation of the corpora and secure reliable new data. This will contribute to the elaboration of a comparative typology of verbal morphosemantic categories based on precise first-hand knowledge of natural linguistic data and enlarging the pool of specialists of East Caucasian, Iranian and Kartvelian languages.