The project was implemented at the University of Oxford’s School of Global and Area Studies (https://www.rees.ox.ac.uk/people/dr.-svetlana-berikashvili) and aimed to investigate Georgian grammar manuscripts and archival materials related to Georgian language studies preserved in the Wardrop Collection at the Bodleian Library. The grant for this project was awarded by the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation of Georgia (SRNSFG) to Dr Svetlana Berikashvili within the joint research programme of the University of Oxford and SRNSFG in Georgian Studies in 2024.

The Wardrop Collection of Georgian manuscripts and archival materials is the core collection at the Bodleian Libraries and one of the major repositories of Georgian material outside of Georgia. It includes 210 items, 75 of which are handwritten books from the 7th to the 20th centuries. Most of the materials have been collected by Sir Oliver Wardrop (1864-1948) and his sister Marjory Wardrop (1869-1909), both well-known scholars, translators, founders and benefactors of Kartvelian studies at the University of Oxford. Learn more about the collection: https://georgian.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

Some of the materials have been digitized and made available through the Digital Bodleian Collection: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections/georgian/. In addition, a separate online digital repository of the Wardrop Collection manuscripts, curated and prepared by Dr I. Lobzhanidze, is available at http://manuscript.iliauni.edu.ge, which serves as a platform for hosting online editions of these materials.

The main objectives of the project were:

(a) to catalogue and conduct research on the grammatical material preserved in the Bodleian’s Collections, beginning with the 18th century manuscript of the first comprehensive Grammar of Georgian cigni ġrammatikaykʻartʻulisamebr enisa [Grammar Book of the Georgian Language] by Anthony I, Bagrationi (MS. Georg. e. 1, dated 1784)

• and extending to archival materials (e.g. MS. Wardr. c. 26, Sir Oliver Wardrop’s translation of the Grammatical Sketch by Dodashvili, 1894 holograph), printed books (e.g. Wardr. 5. 10, L’art libéral, ou, Grammaire géorgienne by Marie-Félicité Brosset, 1834, lithographic edition) and Marjory Wardrop’s language notebooks (e.g. Ms. Wardr. e. 32, Marjory’s handwritten language notebook related to her Georgian studies, 1905–1906). See further details at: http://science.org.ge/bnas/vol-19-2.html;


• (b) to provide online editions of unpublished manuscripts. An online edition of Marjory Wardrop’s notebooks, word-lists and letter drafts related to her Georgian studies has been prepared in XML format in accordance with the TEI P5 Guidelines (Manuscripts module) using the oXygen XML Editor and uploaded to the Wardrop’s Collection Online (WCO) repository: http://manuscript.iliauni.edu.ge;


• (c) to conduct theoretical research on several aspects of Georgian grammar and disseminate the findings through workshops, conference presentations, public lectures and other scientific events. For example, the workshop Universal Properties of Natural Language and Georgian as a case study, convened within the project brought together linguists working on both theoretical and empirical issues to discuss the ways in which specific language parameters can be accounted for by Universal Grammar. More information is available at: https://areastudies.web.ox.ac.uk/universal-properties-natural-language-and-georgian-case-study.

Further information about the project and Georgian programme at the University of Oxford can be found at: https://www.oxforddiplomaticsociety.com/dispatch/dispatch-no-11.

The aim of the project was to analyse Differential Subject Marking (DSM) in Georgian, thereby providing an additional specific case study on DSM. The results of this project are presented in Svetlana's PhD thesis, which is accessible here: https://ediss.uni-goettingen.de/handle/11858/15073

This thesis presents a novel account on DSM in Georgian based on the current progress in minimalist syntax. It is an original contribution to a highly complex problem in Georgian Syntax and comes up with original results that are expected to have an impact both on the research of Georgian Syntax as well as the research on Case Theory (CT) in general. The main idea of the thesis is that Differential Case Marking (DCM) in Georgian is not the effect of operations that take place only in the Morphological Structure (MS) after Spell-out, but both case assignment and agreement based on an already assigned case (dependent, unmarked, etc.), happen in the syntax proper. Moreover, I claim that all subject cases (including the so-called ‘non-canonically marked’ ergative and dative) are structural in Georgian and that Dependent Case Theory (DCT) is enough to deal with structural case assignment. This thesis differs from already existing language-specific accounts in a minimalist framework by applying a pure Dependent Case (DC) algorithm to both ‘non-canonically marked’ subject cases.

The novel data except for the theoretical analysis contains a new empirical domain, new language-specific diagnostics (related, for instance, to test subjecthood in DOC passives, or unergatives vs. unaccusatives, etc.) and new argumentation for the existence of the implicit argument in the unergative structure that contributes to our understanding of Georgian ergativity.

The basic data collection is archived according to current standard of linguistic resources and will be made accessible to the research community via the DSM Database, which is currently under construction. The research is based on the material elicited from different corpora of Georgian language:

• • The Georgian National Corpus (GNC), Modern Georgian, designed and coordinated by J. Gippert, M. Tandashvili and P. Meurer available at http://gnc.gov.ge/gnc/page;


• • The Georgian Language Corpus (GLC), designed and coordinated by N. Doborjginidze and I. Lobzhanidze, available at http://corpora.iliauni.edu.ge/; and,


• • Additional original corpus available at the DSM Database, DSM Questionnaries and Additional examples of m-dative arguments that has been created for obtaining additional empirical evidence about DSM features in Georgian and testing the hypothesis.