Convergence areas in the Caucasus-Western Iran area with respect to relativization strategies

Résumé En

Caucasus-Western Iran area displays an important genetic and typological linguistic diversity. The population of the area being most often bilingual, trilingual or even more, languages are in continuous contact. In this paper, I document the fact that genetically unrelated languages spoken in a same geographical area tend to converge in their relativization strategies, and may thus diverge from their respective families. Three convergence areas are identified regarding three main variation parameters-the position of the RC, the finiteness of the verb, and the nature of the relativizer in case there is one: languages spoken in Eastern Caucasus make a dominant use of prenominal participial RCs, languages spoken in Iran resort to finite postnominal RCs introduced by a complementizer, while languages spoken in the SouthWest Caucasus mainly resort to finite postnominal RCs with relative pronouns. Azeri of Azerbaijan, spoken at the junction of the three delimited isogloss, displays the three strategies and behaves thus as a sort of buffer zone.