a borítólapra  Súgó epa Copyright 
Finno-Ugric languages and linguisticsVol. 9. No. 1-2. (2020.)

Tartalom

  • Editorial1en [97.90 kB - PDF]EPA-02403-00014-0010

Articles

  • Katalin É. Kiss :

    This paper seeks an answer to the question why pronominal objects in Mansi and Northern Khanty are personal pronouns bearing a possessive agreement morpheme encoding the person and number of the given pronoun, and why the possessive suffix of these pronouns is identified as an accusative case marker in Mansi and Northern Khanty grammars. The answer is derived from the morphosyntax of reflexive pronouns, and the morphosyntax of differential object marking in Ob-Ugric. It is argued that pronouns bearing a possessive agreement morpheme are formally reflexive pronouns functioning as referentially independent, emphatic, strong pronouns. In Ob-Ugric, 1st and 2nd person pronominal objects used to be - and in some dialects, still are - barred from topic position by the Inverse Topicality Constraint, and, as focal elements, they are represented by strong pronouns. In Northern Khanty and Northern Mansi, the consistent possessive marking of 1st and 2nd person object pronouns has been analogically extended to 3rd person pronouns, as well. Since only subjects and familiar objects can be topicalized, oblique pronouns have also been barred from topic position, and therefore they also appear in their strong forms. Subjects are topics in these languages, hence subject pronouns have been grammaticized in their weak forms. Since subject pronouns have been consistently represented by the weak (i.e., base) forms, and 1st and 2nd person (and in some languages, 3rd person) object pronouns have been consistently represented by the possessive-marked strong forms, the possessive morphemes of the latter have come to be interpreted as object markers.

    Keywords: accusative case, differential object marking (DOM), Inverse Agreement Constraint, possessive agreement, pronominal object

  • Erika Asztalos :
    Focus in Udmurt: Positions, Contrastivity, and Exhaustivity14-57en [503.33 kB - PDF]EPA-02403-00014-0030

    The paper presents the results of three surveys examining the positions and the interpretation of foci in Udmurt. While confirming Tánczos’s (2010) findings that the most acceptable focus position is the immediately preverbal one, and that sentence-final focusing is also grammatical for a part of the speakers, the results indicate that foci, with some limitations, can also occur in some preverbal but not verb-adjacent positions. Foci associated with the exhaustive particle gine ‘only’ were highly accepted in all tested positions. From the perspective of interpretation, none of the focus positions turned out to be obligatorily contrastive or necessarily exhaustive. Sentence-initial focusing is mostly available for subjects and for dative complements. As for direct object foci, preverbal but not verb-adjacent positions are mostly accessible for personal pronouns and, more broadly, for objects marked with the accusative case suffix. The more flexible distribution of personal pronoun objects as compared to morphologically unmarked objects is presumably related to the high degree of definiteness of the former. The sentence-final focusing strategy was interpreted as a phenomenon induced by Russian influence and as a sign of the ongoing SOV-to-SVO change of Udmurt. The results also show that speakers vary considerably in their focus position preferences.

    Keywords: focus positions, word order, contrastivity, exhaustivity, Udmurt

  • Timofey Arkhangelskiy :
    Web Corpora of Volga-Kama Uralic Languages58-66en [424.58 kB - PDF]EPA-02403-00014-0040

    This paper presents corpora of five minority Uralic languages that belong or are adjacent to the Volga-Kama area, which has been characterized as a Sprachbund (Bereczki 1983, Helimski 2003). A total of 11 corpora contain written and, in one case, spoken texts in Udmurt, Komi, Meadow Mari, Erzya and Moksha languages. The described resources are “web corpora” both in terms of their accessibility (all of them are accessible through a web-based query interface) and, in most cases, in terms of the medium (almost all texts come from web resources, such as digital newspapers and social media). The paper describes the corpora from the user perspective. The main focus is on the search capabilities and on certain research questions that can be studied with the help of these corpora. All corpora are available at http://volgakama.web-corpora.net/.

  • Chris Lasse Däbritz :

    The paper at hand presents a description of the INEL Dolgan Corpus that has been created from 2016 to 2019 within the INEL project, located at the Institute for Finno-Ugric/Uralic Studies of the University of Hamburg. The corpus aims to provide a digital research infrastructure for Dolgan, an indigenous language of Northern Siberia. Though Dolgan is a Turkic language, the corpus is relevant for researchers of Uralic languages both due to the close areal connections of Uralic with Dolgan on the Taymyr peninsula and on account of the fact that it is an example of electronic research infrastructure developed for an endangered language. After introducing Dolgan and the INEL project, the paper describes the INEL Dolgan Corpus in detail, focusing on its linguistic content, annotation layers and search possibilities. Finally, the paper provides an outlook on how the corpus contributes to furthering research on this endangered language.

    Keywords: corpus, INEL project, Dolgan, languages of Northern Siberia, endangered languages