The Iberian-Caucasian Connection in a Typological Perspective

The purpose of the project has been to examine the nature of the grammatical similarities between Basque and the Caucasian languages (primarily Georgian), and to attempt to determine whether or not these grammatical similarities may serve as evidence of genetical relationship or historical contact. The main idea is the following: assuming a basic probability for any given pair of languages to share certain features, it follows that the more features they can be shown to share, the less probable it is that the similarities are coincidental. If similarities are not coincidental, they are presumably the result of genetic relationship or histrorical contact. It has however been shown in typology that certain properties of language tend to be interrelated: a well-known example is that languages with SOV word order almost always have postpositions instead of prepositions. In this respect, what is relevant for any statistical comparison of features between languages is whether or not the extant similarities are interrelated, the intuition behind this being that if the features are not interrelated, it strengthens the possibility of historical or genetic contact (since we are dealing with a greater number of independent similarities). In contrast, if the features are interrelated, we can reduce the number of independent shared features, weakening the probability of historical or genetic contact