The myth of the Caucasian Sprachbund:

It is a commonplace to refer to the Caucasus as a linguistic area or ‘Sprachbund’, that is, as a region where languages of diverse genetic backgrounds hare grammatical features. But whereas lists of area1 features can be readily drawn up for the Balkans, Amazonia, etc., attempts to do the same for the Caucasus come up short. Catford (1978) can only find three features shared by all indigenous languages of the Caucasus: (1) uvular consonants; (2) glot-talized obstruents; (3) ergativity. Of these, only the second appears to be a genuinely area1 feature, being shared with Indo-European and Turkic languages of the Caucasus. Uvular con-sonants are too frequent in Eurasia to he a meaningful criterion. As for ergativity, I will demonstrate that the only common features shared by the morphosyntactic systems of the Abxaz-Adyghean, Nax-Daghestanian and Kartvelian families are reflections of typological universals characterizing the expression of ergativity in all languages (Dixon, Silverstein, Blake, Bossong, etc.) In all other respects, the systems are radically different: Abxaz-Adyghean is head-marking and prefixal; Nax-Daghestanian is dependent-marking, and agree-ment with absolutives refers to gender rather than person; Kartvelian has a complicated dou