Reflexivity in Kazym Khanty
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 p...
Main Authors: | , |
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Format: | Book Part |
Language: | English |
Published: |
Language Science Press
2023
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7874948 |
Summary: | 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. |
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