Research interests / Forschungsschwerpunkte

After receiving my Ph.D. degree in 2006, I have been working on languages of the Nakh-Daghestanian family spoken in the Caucasus, primarily documentation and descriptive work on dialects of Tabasaran (Lezgic). Also, I was involved in a documentation project on Chirag Dargwa supported by the Endangered Languages Documentation Program at the University of London. Apart from fieldwork, documentation and description, I focus on theoretical linguistics. It is of great interest for me to see how empirical data from understudied languages can be interpreted in the light of modern syntactic theories and what contribution data from Nakh-Dagestanian can make to current linguistic theory. I have recently been working on the following topics:ergativity, agreement, person clitics, indexical shift, and logophoricity.

Projekt: SOAS, London/Endangered Language Documentation Programme: “Chirag Documentation Project” (2014-2017).