Tutorials

The tutorial will examine the phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures of contemporary spoken Georgian. It will address the distinctions between the standard and colloquial varieties of the language, with particular emphasis on the integration of modern English loanwords and their grammatical adaptation within Georgian linguistic patterns. 

In this tutorial we will first discuss general questions of language documentation: goals, methods, ethics and responsibility. This discussion will include consideration of the issues of who does the documentation and how to conduct documentation in such a way as to serve both the researcher’s and the community’s goals, with an eye toward the fact that community members are often more interested in documentation that serves their own goals of increasing and maintaining language vitality. 

We will then turn to questions of specific relevance to Caucasian speech communities: working with speakers in the homeland versus diasporic communities, speakers in multilingual settings, and communities experiencing language shift. 

The tutorial will cover word stress and intonation, basic phonological processes, the expression of spatial semantics, principles of constructing simple and complex sentences, and the formation of wh- and yes/no questions. Since Mingrelian is strongly influenced by the state Georgian language, attention will also be focused on language contact from this perspective. 

Tsova-Tush is a language of the Nakh branch of the East Caucasian language family. It is a single-village language spoken in eastern Georgia by approximately 300 speakers. In this tutorial we will go through several salient characteristics of Tsova-Tush, such as the specifics of the alignment system (including person indexing), the system of spatial cases, the iamitive, and language contact phenomena.