Archi

AbstractThe chapter provides a description of Archi, a Lezgic language of the Nakh-Daghestanian family spoken in one village in the highlands of Daghestan. First, the current sociolinguistic situation delivers a view of the language endangerment risks, then the chapter gives an overview of Archi phonological system and discusses the morphosyntactic properties of Archi nouns, pronouns, and minor lexical classes. Next, the article gives an overview of the Archi verb morphosyntax. The chapter then discusses the structure of the simple clause covering such topics as word order, finiteness, valency classes, negation, and agreement, among others. Complex sentences (clause chaining and converbs, relative clauses, complement clauses, adverbial clauses, and long-distance anaphora) are discussed. The chapter closes with outstanding issues that require further research. Whenever possible, the chapter views Archi against the general background of Nakh-Daghestanian languages and discusses the similarities and differences. Due to its unusual history (a Lezgic language which lost the contact with other languages of the group very early on and developed with Lak and Avar as its immediate neighbors), Archi has preserved some archaic phonological as well as morphosyntactic features of Lezgic on the one hand and shows the results of the contact with non-Lezgic languages on the other.