Languages of the Caucasus

This is a sketch grammar of Tabasaran (Glottolog code taba1259), a language of the Lezgic branch of the East Caucasian or Nakh-Daghestanian language family spoken in the Republic of Dagestan, Russian Federation. Tabasaran exhibits a complex morphology, characterized by the retention of archaic features such as preverbs, prefixed and infixed negation and gender/number agreement. At the same time, the language shows curious innovations, including the development of personal agreement, the marking of verbal aspect through preverbation and dialectal variations in tense and mood categories. Tabasaran is known for its rich nominal inflection comprising 46 cases, with 42 of them being spatial or adverbial. This paper covers all areas of grammar and is informed by modern typology. It is based on published descriptions, my own fieldwork, and corpus work collected in Dagestan in the years 2010, 2014 and 2015.