Current projects

Project Leader:

Dr. Michael (Mikhail) Daniel

Funding:

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (2026-2028)

Project description:

East Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian) languages have developed a very peculiar grammatical profile. This old and geographically compact family presents challenges not only to a typologically informed description of its unusual morphosyntactic properties but also to modeling their emergence and evolutionary paths. In language families whose daughters have been in constant contact for hundreds of years, as in East Caucasian, disentangling retention from shared non-inherited patterns resulting from structural convergence or independent parallel development remains a major problem for both diachronic typology and comparative linguistics. I explore one domain, agreement in number, focusing on three cross-linguistically unusual patterns, including agreement of plural personal pronouns, agreement of names of substances and suppletive number agreement in adjectives. The project will contribute both to the methodology of the study of evolution of grammar and to the morphosyntactic typology of agreement. The data for the project come from grammatical descriptions, dictionaries, corpora and the author’s personal fieldnotes and questionnaires collected to this day.

Resilience in the South Caucasus: prospects and challenges of a new EU foreign policy concept and JENA-CAUC 2.0 — The South Caucasus after the “Zeitenwende”: from regional resilience to local agency. More information can be found here.

Project leader:
Dr. Elguja Dadunashvili

Project partners:
Prof. Dr. Diana Forker
Prof. Dr. Friedemann Eugen Schmoll

Period:
2022–2025

Funding:
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

 

Project description:

The astonishing similarity between fairy tale themes in different ethnic groups – often far apart both spatially and culturally – has been the subject of comparative fairy tale research for more than two centuries. Given the universal distribution of the phenomenon, the progress of comparative fairy tale research relies heavily on the representativity of the data made available to it. Each fairy tale repertoire, which is developed by means of coherent methods, helps answering the following questions with which the international fairy tale research is concerned:

1. What are the authentic schemes of individual core stories or storylines in fairy tales?
2. What are the backgrounds of the metaphorically depicted motifs of successive fairy tale episodes?

The initiated research project is supposed to close some gaps concerning these questions. For this purpose, the highly interesting narratives from the Caucasus are particularly suitable. The Caucasian narrative is particularly characterized by the remarkable geographical location of its area of origin. The region has always been considered a place of encounters: The relatively small area is home to speakers of more than 50 languages from five different language families who are in permanent and intensive contact with each other.

The Caucasus is seen as a meeting ground of political powers, rival cultures (Orient vs. Occident), contrasting ways of life (sedentary vs. semi-nomadic) and religions (Islam vs. Christianity, paganism vs. established religions). At the same time, the region is a homogeneous cultural space with shared values and institutions (hospitality, blood feud, swearing brotherhood, code of honour, etc.). All these factors shape the thematic, semantic, and structural characteristics of the oral folklore tradition of the Caucasus and make it particularly appealing for comparative narrative research.

The project has one main goal and three other sub-goals. The main goal is the comparative analysis and interpretation of Caucasian narratives. This broad main objective is divided into further sub-objectives:

1. Digital indexing,
2. Cataloging,
3. Typological-comparative characteristics of ethnical-regional fairy tale repertoires (starting with Dagestanian fairy tales).

The overall goal is to be achieved successively and by using inductive research methods. This means that future subprojects will also be supported by the methodology and digital infrastructure developed within the framework of the present project. Although the present project is limited to the indexing of Dagestanian fairy tales, the core project will provide methodological and infrastructural tools for the fulfilment of the overall project goal.

Project Website