Dependency and discourse-configurationality: A study of Avar

Abstract

The present doctoral thesis examines the syntax and semantics of a number of constructions encoding operator-variable dependencies in Avar, a Northeast Caucasian language predominantly spoken in the Republic of Daghestan in the Russian Federation. In doing so it touches upon such empirical domains as reflexivity and anaphoricity, argument structure, Ā-movement, pronominalisation and pro-drop, as well as important theoretical notions of numeration, derivation, locality, formal features, modularity and the general architecture of the grammar.