Zur Syntax von Topiks in nordchantischen Dialekten

• Main Author: Chris Lasse Däbritz
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2018
• Subjects: khanty
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8232206

This study deals with the syntactic representation of topics in Northern Khanty dialects within a generative framework of minimalist character. After a discussion of the existing research on Khanty information structure (section 2) and a short description of the model of information structure applied here (section 3), the syntactic representation of topics in Northern Khanty dialects is analyzed on the basis of three corpora of Northern Khanty varieties (section 4). The major outcome of this study is that (Northern) Khanty is to be regarded as a topic-prominent language where the sentence-initial position (in generative terms: adjunction of the topic constituent to the subject agreement phrase AgrSP) plays a crucial role in marking topics; the passive, in turn, which itself is atypical for topic-prominent languages, is not to be regarded as a default mechanism of topicalization, as the subject in passive clauses is not always to be analyzed as the topic of the sentence.