Prof. Dr. Peter Arkadiev – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Prof. Dr. Peter Arkadiev

Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz
Linguistics

External Senior Fellow (Marie S. Curie FCFP)
November 2023 – August 2024

Last Update: 31.08.2024

Curriculum Vitae

Peter Arkadiev graduated from the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow in 2004, and in 2006 defended there his PhD dissertation “Typology of two-term case systems” (in Russian). In 2019 he defended his Habilitation “Areal typology of prefixal perfectivisation” (in Russian) at the Institute for Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2005–2022 he was a research fellow at the Department of Typology and comparative linguistics of the Institute for Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and in 2008–2022 an Assistant Professor (from 2021 Professor) at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian State University for the Humanities. In 2012–2021 he also worked in international projects at the universities of Vilnius and Mainz. In 2022, being opposed to Putin’s regime’s military invasion into Ukraine and oppression of human rights, he left Russia and since then worked at the Slavistics department of the University of Zürich and at the Department of English and Linguistics of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. In 2023 he was elected member of Academia Europaea. His academic interests include language typology and wide-scale cross-linguistic comparison, areal linguistics and language contact, case systems and argument structure, tense-aspect-actionality, morphological complexity, polysynthesis and morphology-syntax interface, Baltic, Slavic and Northwest Caucasian languages.

Selected Publications

Monograph: “Areal Typology of Prefixal Perfectivization” (in Russian, Moscow, 2015)
(together with Yury Lander) The Northwest Caucasian languages. In: Maria Polinsky (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Languages of the Caucasus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, 369–446. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190690694.013.3
(Non)finiteness, constructions, and participles in Lithuanian. Linguistics 58-2 (2020), 379–424. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2020-0045
Multiple ergatives: From allomorphy to differential agent marking. Studies in Language 41-3 (2017), 717–780. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.41.3.06ark
Marking of subjects and objects in Lithuanian non-finite clauses: A typological and diachronic perspective. Linguistic Typology 17-3 (2013), 397–437. https://doi.org/10.1515/lity-2013-0020

FRIAS Project

Argument flagging in head-marking languages: Types of interaction between argument-coding systems

The project aims at investigating cross-linguistic diversity in the domain of interaction between the two main morphological argument-coding systems found in human languages, flagging (case marking) and indexing (verbal agreement/cross-reference). More particularly, the goal of the project is to establish a typology of argument-flagging systems in languages possessing highly-developed head-marking with a focus on how the two systems of argument encoding are distributed and interact with each other, and to try to uncover functional and, where possible, diachronic motivations for the observed types of such interactions. The project will involve a construction of a database comprising ca. 300 languages from diverse language families and linguistic areas, as well as of a genealogically stratified sample based on this database in order to conduct quantitative analysis. The research questions addressed in the project include those not covered in the typological literature, e.g. patterns of matching vs. mismatching between flagging and indexing, the extent and motivation of double-marking of different argument roles, possibility of indexing of peripheral participants etc. I believe that a broad empirical investigation of the cross-linguistic variation in this domain will not only contribute to the better understanding of the workings and development of human language, but will also be potentially beneficial for interdisciplinary studies involving sophisticated linguistic data.