Севернохантыйская посессивность и типология детерминации

Родной язык: лингвистический журнал. 2023. № 2. С. 6–51.

Mikhailov S.

In many Uralic languages, possessive agreement markers form a special determiner system. Following several studies that argue for grammaticalization of Uralic possessives into determiners, the current study describes the semantics of four such determiners in the Kazym dialect of Northern Khanty, based on original field data, and sets them against the background of recent results from typology and theory of determiner semantics. Although these determiners involve well-known semantic features (familiarity, uniqueness, salience, partitivity, intensional rigidity), some of the combinations of these features observed in Northern Khanty have not been attested previously in the world’s languages, as far as I can say. For instance, I claim that in Northern Khanty, there are possessive definites, as well as a determiner marking the most salient referent. In other cases, the Northern Khanty data confirm the findings of my predecessors, with the only difference being that in their data the relevant oppositions are expressed by expressions unrelated to possessives. Thus, this study contributes to determiner typology and to field-based semantics of languages of Russia, continuing the direction of research in Uralic studies started by [Nikolaeva 2003; Fraurud 2001; Kuznetsova 2003].

Keywords: salience, definiteness, Northern Khanty, определённость, севернохантыйский язык, салиентность, possessives, field-based semantics, полевая семантика, partitive specificity, proprial article, посессивы, партитивная специфичность, проприальный артикль

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