Diagnosing Kazym Khanty unpossessives, or how to tell a synchronically independent marker from its diachronic source

Ural-Altaic Studies. 2024. No. 4(55). P. 31–56.

Stiopa Mikhailov

Uralic possessive agreement suffixes often develop determiner-like functions. Several authors have suggested monosemic analyses of such functions as derived from the basic possessive meaning. However, recent studies have argued that the functions they investigate must be treated as synchronically independent markers because they do not behave morphosyntactically in the same way that their corresponding proper possessives do. Building on the work of my predecessors, I develop several unpossessive diagnostics to test whether a non-possessive function displays the same behavior as the proper possessive function of the same exponent with respect to several morphophonological, morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic parameters. I apply these diagnostics to the Kazym Khanty second-person singular possessive -en/-an in its three non-possessive functions. I argue that these functions must be treated as three distinct unpossessive markers: the associative possessive, the salient article, and the proprial article. These markers are homonymous with the proper possessive but are synchronically independent from it. Furthermore, I develop an analysis of these markers within the framework of Distributed Morphology, which allows us to model their differences while also accounting for their similarities. I address some potential weaknesses of this analysis, justifying them by appealing to how grammaticalization processes normally work. The approach to non-possessive functions of possessives presented in this paper should be applied to data from other languages that feature extended possessives.

Keywords: грамматикализация, grammaticalization, Uralic languages, уральские языки, definiteness, посессивность, определённость, possessives, Distributed Morphology, Kazym dialect of Northern Khanty, распределённая морфология, казымский диалект севернохантыйского языка

Publication based on the results of: Хантыйский язык в типологическом освещении: аспекты грамматического описания (2023)