Agreement of essive adverbials in Tanti Dargwa

Abstract In Tanti Dargwa (Nakh-Daghestanian; Daghestan), ‘essive spatial expressions’ (comprising locative forms of nouns, locative adverbs, and postpositions) are characterized by the presence of a gender–number agreement suffix. While the absolutive argument of the clause is the typical controller of agreement in the language, in transitive clauses containing a copula, both the copula and the essive adverbial appear to be controlled by an ergative argument. An even more complex situation is observed in embedded clauses. These phenomena can be explained by postulating that copulas head their own constituents and govern their own absolutive arguments in a control relation with the ergative of the lower clause. The data provide evidence of the typologically rare phenomenon of backward control, which has previously only been observed in Tsezic languages.