Unusual behaviour of agreement markers in Nakh-Daghestanian languages
Nakh-Daghestanian languages are famous for its rich and versatile agreement. Among the phenomena attracting linguists' attention are absolutives as agreement controllers in the clause, agreement of non-finite forms, multiple agreement of participles and long-distance agreement. In addition to these known facts, many Nakh-Daghestanian languages have unusual agreement targets such as adverbs, postpositions, pronouns and even nouns agreeing with the absolutive of the clause. Usage and morphosyntactic properties of these targets have not been studied in any detail. This paper focuses on instances where these targets allow variation in the choice of controller and semantic and pragmatic effects of the choice. Thus, the agreeing adverbs can take the controller depending on their semantic scope and some agreeing demonstratives have a controller choice if they function as markers of information structure.