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© Vincent Moncorgé

Michael
DANIEL

Linguistics

Contact details

Research topics

SCIENTIFIC PROJECT

"Pattern convergence in the domain of argument marking"

The project envisages a quantitative study of similarities in argument marking across East Caucasian languages and their neighbors, with the aim to identify, in this domain of morphosyntax, cases of structural convergence by pattern copy and spread. The analysis is based on a comparison of the choice of flagging (case or adposition) for the same set of verbal meanings. The methodology relies on the data derived from the questionnaire used in BivalTyp, a large-scale database of flagging in the world’s languages, which already has data from a number of East Caucasian languages. Methodologically, the challenge is whether the BivalTyp questionnaire provides enough empirical resolution to detect language contact between genealogically related languages.

Activities / Resume

Michael Daniel’s areas of interest include languages of the Caucasus, linguistic typology, particularly morphology and morphosyntax, and sociolinguistics, particularly variationist studies and contact linguistics. Major projects he took part in include the World Atlas of Language Structures, Eastern Armenian National Corpus, Ustja River Basin Corpus, the Atlas of Multilingualism in Daghestan and Number in the World’s Languages. He does descriptive, documentation and sociolinguistic fieldwork in various languages of Daghestan, including Archi, Mehweb, Rutul, and Tukita; as well as Alutor (Chukotkan), Nganasan (Uralic), Mishar Tatar and Chuvash (Turkic). He also does typological research on grammatical categories, including number, case and spatial relations.