Reflexivity in Kazym Khanty ...

• Main Authors: Volkova, Anna, Toldova, Svetlana
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Zenodo 2023
• Subjects: Heine; khanty; Siberia
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7874947; https://zenodo.org/record/7874947

This paper discusses reflexivity strategies in the Kazym dialect of Khanty, an endangered Uralic language spoken in northwestern Siberia. Khanty is a language without dedicated reflexive pronouns (Nikolaeva 1995, 1999b); to express reflexivity Kazym Khanty speakers use personal pronouns, a doubled pronoun construction or add a particle to a personal pronoun. For a closed class of verbs in Kazym Khanty detransitivising suffixes can be employed to convey the reflexive meaning. The absence of dedicated reflexive pronouns is a typological rarity, cross-linguistically they are considered the “norm” (Heine & Miyashita 2008; Moyse-Faurie 2008). The paper presents a hypothesis about how Kazym Khanty avoids excessive anaphoric ambiguity. ...