Abstract
One of the features that distinguishes Daghestanian languages of the Caucasus from many other languages is the richness of the nominal paradigm, which arises due to large locative subsystems, counting up to eighty forms. This paper presents a description of major distinctions made by Daghestanian in the topological domain. The paper reveals three basic semantic oppositions underlying systems of nominal locative markers and describes a number of minor points of variation. In the domain of location in Ground this is the distinction between location in container and location in substance. In the domain of location on Ground, the primary division in most languages of the family is between attachment and nonattachment configurations. In the domain of location near Ground, several languages use the formal distinction between localization marker and postposition to reflect the semantic contrast between location in a space associated with a given Ground and location near Ground. The detailed comparison shows that the same distinction can function quite differently even in related languages. The paper also makes a number of crosslinguistic observations related to patterns found in Daghestanian.
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