Reference Grammar for Megrelian

The aim of the project is to write a reference grammar for the South Caucasian (Kartvelian) language Megrelian. The language is spoken in Western Georgia by approx. half a million. There is no written standard for Megrelian and no other institutional support for the language. However, Megrelian is the dominating language in Western Georgia in all social situations where the use of a written language is not required, Megrelians use Georgian as their written language, but the two languages are not mutually intelligible. The grammatical description will be based on an analysis corpus data, both from published collections of texts and new data collected by the research group. Aspects of particular typological interest will be treated in greater detail, including the complex system of tense/aspect/mood-forms, the issue of ergativity, the rich derivational and inflectional morphology with subject and object agreement and a system of both initial and final subjunctions. Comparative data from the closely related language Laz (spoken in Turkey) will be included.

The research group consists of scholars from the Department och Linguistics, Lund University (Sweden), Zugdidi University and the Chikobava Institute of Linguistics at the Georgian Academy of Sciences:  

• Vazha Shengelia (Georgia)
• Karina Vamling (project leader, Sweden)
• Revaz Sherozia (Georgia)
• Revaz Tchantouria (Sweden)
• Natia (Georgia)

Karina Vamling 2001-10-13