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Semantics of the Northern Khanty 2SG Possessive and of Related and Competing Markers (Master's thesis)
This is an unpublished Master's thesis from the HSE University. This paper argues for a radical polysemy account of the extended uses of the Northern Khanty POSS2 markers — -en [poss.2sg] and -ən [poss.2nsg] (the latter only relevant for the possessive markers considered) — whereby each of the extended uses is said to correspond to a separate marker. Building on my work from last year (Mikhailov (manuscript)), I revise some of the arguments for such an account provided there and add further properties which form the basis for distinguishing the four markers realized as POSS2. These include: the proper possessive, the associative possessive, the topic marker, and the proprial article. The novel contributions of this paper include the following. The explicit possessor diagnostic introduced in this work was applied to all of the four markers showing that only the proper possessive allows for such. The most crucial contribution of this diagnostic was to the revision of the second marker — the associative possessive. Based on the unavailability of overt possessors with POSS2 in this use as well as with other possessive morphemes, it was concluded that the associative possessive usually expressing heavily context-dependent relations and restricted to unique referents has the full possessive paradigm and is not restricted to POSS2 as was assumed in (Mikhailov (manuscript)). The proper possessive, on the other hand, trivially allows for an explicit possessor and does not imply uniqueness which leads to the non-trivial conclusion that Northern Khanty grammar does not have the entity-deriving iota type-shift proposed for English in (Coppock, Beaver 2015). Based on an argument from the range of relations available to the two markers, I analyze the proper possessive as corresponding to Karvovskaya’s (2018) MaxSpec operator and the associative possessive as corresponding to the MinSpec operator of (Ibid.) with certain refinements concerning the presuppositions of the two. For the topic marker field text data were consulted for the first time. These data led to the discovery of the marker’s restriction to topical salient subjects, which is more specific than the restriction to anaphorically-given referents of (Mikhailov (manuscript)) and which distinguishes this marker from the other three. Here the salient article hypothesis (cf. Barlew 2014) proposed for the second marker in (Mikhailov (manuscript)) and rejected in the current work was appealed to once again for third marker. I argue that the topic marker appears to be restricted to subjects as in other positions it competes and loses to the associative possessive, due to the latter having a stronger presupposition. Finally, it was argued that the fourth marker is indeed a proprial article as it is rigid in reference unlike the topic marker which follows from the analysis of proprial articles of (Muñoz 2019). The diagnostics used in this work and the arguments pursued can be straightforwardly put to use in investigations of extended possessive marking beyond the Kazym dialect of Northern Khanty.
