EASTERN KHANTY COMPLEX-CLAUSE: PRAGMATICS & SYNTAX OF ADV-CLAUSES

• Main Author: Andrey Filchenko
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: khanty; Siberia
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.506.979; http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/uhlcs/LENCA/LENCA-3/information/abstract-files/filchenko-andrey-4.pdf

The presentation outlines the work in progress dealing with the description and analysis of the main types of morphosyntactic, discourse-pragmatic and propositional-semantic features of com-plex clauses, particularly constructions with non-finite Adv- and Rel-clauses in Eastern Khanty – a Finno-Ugric language of indigenous hunter-gatherer communities of north-western Siberia to-taling under 500 speakers. The empirical base of the study is a corpus of Eastern Khanty natural narratives both collected originally and published previously. Selected methodology includes contrastive morpho-syntactic and contextual analysis of the narratives [1; 2; 3], employing the information structure analysis [4], pragmatic centering frame-work [5], in the general functional-typological framework. Eastern Khanty non-finite construc-tions of interest are participial Adv-clauses (1, 3, 4, 5), shown in contrast to Rel-clauses (2), both predominantly pre-posed in the SOV Eastern Khanty [6], and traditionally analyzed as subordinate clauses displaying the typologically universal types of binding [2, 3]: i) intonation integration under a single intonation contour with the main clause; ii) relational government by the main-clause’s Su or O; and iii) reduced finiteness, in terms of pronominal agreement and TAM of the verb, or case-marking and determiners on the subject or object. Concurrently, these constructions display a continuum of diverse morphosyntactic means (1 vs. 3, vs. 4 and 5), which are taken to illustrate the non-discreteness, gradience of such features as finiteness, dependence, control, co-herence, and pragmatic salience, with an overarching iconic principle recurrent throughout the cognitive-functional paradigm [7; 4; 8], i.e. there is a strong iconic correlation of increasing morphosyntactic expression to decreasing informational predictability/relevance. Based on the monostratal analysis of the host of the interrelated discourse-pragmatic, semantic and grammati-cal features of the participants in their interaction, it is ...