Spreading of valency patterns across dialects

Abstract The paper deals with variation in argument encoding attested in Evenki dialects. Evenki (Tungusic) is spoken in a large area throughout Siberia and manifests a high dialectal diversity. I consider 9 verbs with variable argument encoding strategies across 15 Evenki dialects. The main data on 6 dialects were obtained from two corpora of Evenki, supplementary data come from grammatical descriptions. The cluster analysis of variation in argument encoding shows the following results. Clusters of dialects based on valency patterns do not match the existing classification of Evenki dialects. At the same time, they correlate much better with the areal distribution of the dialects and with the presence/absence of contact with other languages. This supports the claim that valency patterns are diachronically unstable and tend to be easily borrowed.