Clause Linkage In The Languages Of The Ob Yenisei Area

The volume explores clause-linkage strategies from a cross-linguistic perspective with an emphasis on asyndetic constructions. The data-driven approaches focus on areal differences and similarities in using non-finite verb forms in complex sentences in languages situated in Central and Western Siberia.

The volume explores clause-linkage strategies from a cross-linguistic perspective with an emphasis on asyndetic constructions. The data-driven approaches focus on areal differences and similarities in using non-finite verb forms in complex sentences in languages situated in Central and Western Siberia.

Originalia - Viviana Ballaera: Klasse(n) Geschmack! Kulinarischer Geschmack als Ausdruck sozialer Differenzierung in Helsinki - Anja Behnke: 'Clause chaining' im Ob-Jenissej Gebiet - Maria Brykina, Josefina Budzisch: If only Selkup had an optative ... (A corpus study of the lV-form in Selkup dialects) - Svetlana Edygarova: The Udmurt language between 1920 and 1950 - Ekaterina Georgieva: Syntactic correlates of (non-)finiteness in Udmurt - Beáta Wagner-Nagy, Susann Fischer: Word order in Selkup Diskussion und Kritik - Benjamin Schweitzer: Irmeli Hautamäki, Laura Piippo, Helena Sederholm (Hrsgg.): Avantgarde Suomessa. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura 2021 (Tietolipas 267)

This book explores unusual patterns of agreement, one of the most intriguing and theoretically challenging aspects of human language. Agreement is typically thought to reflect a structural relationship between a verb and its arguments within the clause, and all major theories of agreement have been developed with the centrality of this relationship in mind. But beyond the verb, items belonging to practically every other part of speech have been found to function as agreement targets, including adpositions, adverbs, converbs, nouns, pronouns, complementizers, and other conjunctions. Data on these targets provide rich insights into the structural domains in which agreement operates, demonstrating that unusual targets can be associated with unexpected domains that are independent of the agreement domain of the verb. Following an introduction to the typology of unusual targets and unexpected domains across the world's languages, the chapters in this volume provide detailed treatments of a wide range of rare and complex agreement phenomena in seven languages, belonging to five different language families of Eurasia and the Pacific. The contributions are all based on novel data collected by the authors, which detail the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of agreement on non-verbal targets within the clause.

The Languages and Linguistics of Northern Asia: A Comprehensive Guide surveys the indigenous languages of Asia’s North Pacific Rim, Siberia, and adjacent portions of Inner Eurasia. It provides in-depth descriptions of every first-order family of this vast area, with special emphasis on family-internal subdivision and dialectal differentiation. Individual chapters trace the origins and expansion of the region’s widespread pastoral-based language groups as well as the microfamilies and isolates spoken by northern Asia’s surviving hunter-gatherers. Separate chapters cover sparsely recorded languages of early Inner Eurasia that defy precise classification and the various pidgins and creoles spread over the region. Other chapters investigate the typology of salient linguistic features of the area, including vowel harmony, noun inflection, verb indexing (also known as agreement), complex morphologies, and the syntax of complex predicates. Issues relating to genealogical ancestry, areal contact and language endangerment receive equal attention. With historical connections both to Eurasia’s pastoral-based empires as well as to ancient population movements into the Americas, the steppes, taiga forests, tundra and coastal fringes of northern Asia offer a complex and fascinating object of linguistic investigation.

Linguists and specialists are familiar with the name Ket, which designates a small ethnic group on the Yenisei and their language. Ket is a severely endangered language with today less than 500 native speakers. Together with Yugh, Kott, Arin, Assan and Pumpokol, it forms the Yeniseic family of languages, which has no known linguistic relatives.

The volume is a collection of thirteen papers given at the “Third Syntax of the World’s Languages” conference, complemented with four additional papers as well as an introduction by the editors. All contributions deal with clause combining, focusing on one or both of the following two dimensions of analysis: properties of the clauses involved, types of dependency. The studies are data-driven and have a cross-linguistic or typological orientation. In addition to survey papers the volume contains in-depth studies of particular languages, mostly based on original data collected in recent field work.