A rare type of benefactive construction: Evidence from Enets

Abstract

Together with other Northern Samoyedic languages, Enets shows a crosslinguistically unusual way of expressing benefactive semantics. The Enets benefactive construction consists of a specific “destinative” affix that marks the presence of a beneficiary in a given clause and of a possessive affix that marks the beneficiary itself. Both affixes are attached to one of the verb's arguments. This makes the beneficiary encoded as an adnominal dependent of the verb's argument. This paper has two goals. Firstly, a detailed description of the Enets benefactive construction is provided, including its morphology, morphosyntax, and peculiarities of the differential object marking. Secondly, we aim to establish crosslinguistic parallels with the Enets benefactive construction. While phenomena with similar semantic features have been attested in the world's languages, we show that the Enets construction demonstrates a unique set of semantic and morphosyntactic properties.

Forest Enets and Tundra Enets: How different are they and why?

“…It is precisely in this domain that the two Enets look extremely similar, as might be expected from very close dialects. Apart from the few exceptions discussed below, all grammatical morphemes behave identically, with detailed corpus-based studies being undertaken for the following categories: Perfect, including both absolute and narrative uses, (Khanina & Shluinsky 2016), Passive (Khanina & Shluinsky 2014b), Future and Debitive ), Imperatives (Khanina & Shluinsky 2015a, General Converb (Shluinsky 2018), Core cases (Khanina & Shluinsky 2015b), Destinative (Khanina & Shluinsky 2014a), and emphatic transcategorial affixes (Topical, Restrictive, Insistive) (Khanina & Shluinsky 2011a). On the level of constructions, we observe no differences either, and the following have been contrastively described in corpus data: • Aorist of the negative verb used with the contrastive cross-reference to denote an emphatic positive statement (Khanina & Shluinsky 2011b),…”

“…Second, patterns for differential object marking do not coincide in the two Enets if the Destinative suffix is present in the direct object. In Forest Enets the use of Nominative vs. Oblique is governed by the distinction between other-benefactive vs. selfbenefactive contexts, while in the Tundra Enets Oblique this distinction is clearly irrelevant, but the distinction between specific vs. non-specific contexts might be important (see Khanina & Shluinsky 2014a).…”

“…While preparing a pan-dialectal grammar of Enets, we have studied in detail dozens of Enets morphological, morphosyntactic, and syntactic structures on corresponding corpora 1 , as well as comparing them with elicited data on phonology and morphology (see Khanina 2016aKhanina , 2016bKhanina , 2018, Khanina & Shluinsky 2011a, 2011b, 2012, 2014a, 2014b, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2016Shluinsky 2018Shluinsky , 2020aShluinsky , 2020b, and can claim that there are differences between the two Enets lects only in a surprisingly small number of cases. However, diverging reflexes of Proto-Northern-Samoyed phonemes and a number of non-cognate lexemes with identical meanings suggest another scenario: the diversifycation of these languages happened at least several hundred years ago, or even one thousand years ago, based on lexicostatistical calculations (Koryakov 2018).…”