[en] The current study is devoted to the topic of anaphora in two East Caucasian languages and continues my previous research (Mukhin, 2021) and (Mukhin, 2022). The main goal of the study is to describe and compare the factors affecting the choice of reference-tracking means in two distantly related languages of the East Caucasian language family, Kina Rutul (Lezgic) and Mehweb Dargwa (Dargwa) by applying several quantitative metrics developed in (Givón, 1983) and testing findings obtained in (Ariel, 1990), as well as developing and testing some approaches to the description of the anaphoric functions at microlevel. In particular, I am going to test the hypothesis that the choice of a specific demonstrative (proximal vs medial vs distal) as a referring expression depends on the distance from the antecedent/previous mention or, more generally, on the Accessibility degree in terms of Ariel (1990). I also try to capture the difference in their discourse function by annotating additional features (e.g. the number of previous mentions). The primary metric used in this work is Anaphoric (referential) Distance (AD). The main source of the data are transcriptions of recordings of Pear stories (Chafe, 1980) in the two languages.
