This paper deals with attributive possession in North, Central and South Selkup and focuses on a quantitative analysis of the frequency with which marking strategies are used in Selkup dialects. In Selkup, attributive possession can be head marked (with a possessive suffix), dependent marked (with genitive or adessive marking), and double marked (both combined), but close study shows that while dependent marking with genitive is most commonly used for lexical possessors, for non-lexical possessors the most common usage is head marking with a possessive suffix. The paper also illustrates the usage of different types of possession (e.g. inalienable/alienable) and shows that they are rarely treated differently with regard to their marking.
The paper at hand aims at describing the basic patterns of syntax and semantics of noun phrases in Selkup; all four dialect groups of Selkup (Northern, Central, Southern and Ket) are taken into account for the description of NPs but it can be shown that they do not differ regarding the structure of noun phrases. The approach is corpus based, the data in use stems from two corpora: INEL Selkup corpus (Brykina et al. 2020) and the SLE corpus (Budzisch et al. 2019), together they consist of 404 texts with 16,741 sentences and 94,553 tokens. Noun phrases can be bare or modified in Selkup; in the latter case no agreement of modifier and head noun is observed in any case. The modifiers occurring in Selkup are adjectives, numerals and quantifiers, demonstratives, possessors as well as participles forming relative clauses. Generally, it can be said that noun phrases in Selkup are structured as expected in an articless SOV language, namely exhibiting no agreement and being head-final. There is one seeming exception, namely the universal quantifiers muntɨk ‘all; whole’ and wes’ ‘all; whole’, which can be placed after the noun they modify.
The dissertation at hand deals with definiteness in Selkup. It is investigated how in Selkup – taking the three dialect groups North, Central and South Selkup into account – semantic-pragmatic definiteness is expressed, since the language lacks an explicit grammatical marker (like a definite article) for the expression of definiteness. The analysis is carried out on the basis of existing research literature, elicit data and a corpus, which is composed of 248 texts with 12,828 sentences and 77,443 tokens.In its entirety, Selkup thus shows that demonstratives, possessive associations and the non-possessive use of the possessive suffix of the third person singular are the most important strategies for marking definiteness. All types of references, however, contain large numbers of unmarked noun phrases, showing that context is often the decisive factor in deciding whether a noun phrase is to be interpreted as definite or indefinite.
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