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THE KET LANGUAGE: FROM DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS TO INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2013. Issue 1 (1). P. 38-44

For centuries, linguists have been interested in the possibility of a genetic relationship between Siberian and Native American languages. In 1968 in his fundamental work “The Ket Language”, A.P. Dulzon wrote: “The Ket language being the most studied in the group of Yeniseian languages has a very complicated and peculiar verb morphology system. This system has many typological correspondences in its main features with the verb morphology system of Basque, Burushaski, many Caucasian languages and Native American’s languages” (Dulzon 1968). This paper focuses on common problems connected with the extinction of the Ket language and the current sociolinguistic situation in areas where Kets currently reside. Work on recording, processing and digitalizing archived language data performed at the Department for Siberian Indigenous Languages of Tomsk State Pedagogical University is also described below. The paper concludes with a linguist’s point of view on the hypothesis of Dene-Yeniseian relationship and also a lay-person’s point of view on it.

Keywords: Ket language, sociolinguistic situation, language shift, linguistic corpus, Dene-Yeniseian Hypothesis

THE NUMBERS PEOPLE PLAY WITH: NUMERALS IN THE CONTEXT OF VERBAL CREATIVITY OF THE KETS // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2014. Issue 3 (5). P. 9-16

Not only in modern research on indigenous languages, but also in the national languages with centuries-old traditions until recently there are contradictory opinions on formation of the numeral class into a content word. A wide diversity and variety of forms is noticed, deviations from the inflections are noticed. Besides, in understudied languages a variety of forms for the same numerals beyond the limit of the first ten is observed. The article is devoted to the functions, which cardinal numerals from 1 through 7 take in folklore and household texts and how the numerals are objectified in linguistic worldimage of the Kets. Material of the Ket folklore and household texts corpus, consisting of 30 texts (about 1100 sentences) served as a basis for this research. The numerals’ etymology is not covered by the report (see Werner, 2006 as per etymology). The numerals from 1 through 7 can be noticed in the Ket texts very often: qoˀk (AN) / qūsʲ (INAN) ‘one’ – 15 cases of use; ɨ̄n ‘two’ – 15 cases of use; doˀŋ ‘tree’ – 9 cases of use; sīk ‘four’ – 9 cases of use; qāk ‘five’ – 5 cases of use; ā ‘six’ – 3 cases of use; oˀn ‘seven’ – 2 cases of use. Besides reflecting the exact quantitative characteristic, the numerals perform some other functions: the numeral qoˀk (AN) / qūsʲ (INAN) ‘one’ is used as an indefinite article; ɨ̄n ‘two’ and doˀŋ ‘three’ can be noticed in word combinations with the word deˀŋ ‘people’ and acquire a cumulative meaning ‘twain’, ‘threesome’; sīk ‘four’ and qāk ‘five’ can be observed in a complex substantivized combination. All the numerals can be a part of an attribute. There is a cumulative context consisting of 6 elements in one text. The even numerals have a connection with evil spirits: ɨnˈitaŋ – ‘two-teeth’ (Kajgus’); sektaɣantuːsʲa ‘four-fingered’ (Kolbasam); ˀasʲɨk qoj ‘six year old bear’ (in the fairy tale it struggles with the main character’s grandmother). The odd numerals are closely connected with the world-view of the Kets, their cosmogonical ideas and their customs. The world, according to visualization of the Kets consists of three parts – the upper world, consisting of seven layers; the middle world, washed by seven seas; the lower world, which consists of seven subsoil caves. According to the Ket’s beliefs a man has seven souls, one of them is the main. The odd numerals can often be noticed in rituals, e.g. marriage: during the third meeting, the fiancée’s relatives agree to the marriage, after the marriage, the bride should live at her parent’s tent for three days. The fact that the cardinal numerals from 1 through 7 can be found in the texts often, is defined by the needs of the language speakers, their cultural and cosmogonic concepts of the world.

Keywords: the Ket language, cardinal numerals 1 through 7, functioning of the numerals in folklore texts, sacral meaning of numbers

POSSESSIVE NOUN CONSTRUCTIONS IN KET // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2015. Issue 4 (10). P. 55-61

When describing Ket grammar, a scientist faces a range of controversial linguistic phenomena. It refers to possessive constructions: both noun and predicative possessive constructions. Here are some questions that are being discussed in Ket language studies: how to define the status of the indicator da/d(i) in a noun paradigm, is it a Genitive case suffix or a marker of possession, is da/d(i) a single form for expressing possession or two homonymous forms (Genitive case suffix and possessive suffix), is the indicator da/d(i) a morphological element or a syntactic word? Noun and attributive possessive constructions in Ket have been a topic of a number of studies that open the subject of a possessive category to a certain extent. These are Ket grammar books and articles of Russian (Vall, Kanakin, 1985: 44–46; Vall, Kanakin, 1990: 70–73, 75) and foreign scientists (Georg, 2007: 107–108, 119–120, 165–166; Vajda, 2004: 21–23; Werner, 1997: 104–119, 134–136). Also there is a typological work that discusses possessive constructions in detail (Kotorova, Nefedov, 2006) and a comparative work that considers predicative possessive constructions in Yenisei and Athabaskan languages (Vajda, 2013). This research aims at methodology approbation for describing noun possessive constructions in Ket. The research is based on an empirical method that allows to describe the current language functioning and a quantitative method that strengthens the evidence base and validity of obtained results.

Keywords: Ket, possessive noun constructions, possessive pronouns, possessive clitics, dependent marking, head marking

POSSESSIVE PREDICATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN KET (CORPUS-DRIVEN RESEARCH) // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2016. Issue 4 (14). P. 22-36

The main means of expression of possessive predicativity in Ket are constructions with adessive case. Despite the fact that the leading researchers in the field of the Ket studies mention this construction, until now there is no individual papers devoted to the subject under research. By way of syntactic expressing the relationships of belonging the Ket language refers to the esselanguages. In the Ket language there is no verb ‘to have’, in possessive predicative constructions are used zero-encoding and two existential predicate copulas: the first – for the present (usam), the second – for the past time (obɨlde). The order of words in possessive predicative constructions is fixed: the possessor – the possessed – the predicative. Deviations from this order of words are attributed to the actual sentence division. The strategy of predicative possessiveness expression in the Ket language can be referred to the locative type as in the constructions with the meaning of possession the locative case is used: adessive case. The forms of this case are -daŋta / -diŋta / -naŋta, and the case name indicates that it marks the animate objects. The most frequent are possessive predicative constructions with zero-encoding (17 occurrences), half this quantity less there are the constructions with the predicate copula obɨlde (8 occurrences), more than half this quantity less there are the negative constructions (7 occurrences) and the constructions with usam (6 occurrences). The quantitative data in the calculation of existential constructions with usam and obɨlde and locative constructions with adessive case, which do not express the meaning of belonging, show that they occur in isolated contexts. Thus, there is reason to believe that in the Ket language adessive case focuses on the expression of possessive relations in predicative constructions. Existential predicate copulas usam and obɨlde are likely to be more recent innovation, and are possibly formed under the influence of the Russian language.

Keywords: Ket, possessive predicative constructions, adessive, locative constructions, existential constructions

POSSESSIVE RELATIONS IN KET: PROTOTYPICAL CONSTRUCTIONS AND PERIPHERAL CASES // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2017. Issue 4 (18). P. 42-55

The present article focuses on the description and analysis of means used to express possessive relations in Ket belonging to different levels of language structure (prosodic, morhosyntactic and lexical). The article surveys both adnominal and predicative possessive constructions in the language distinguishing between prototypical possessive strategies (possessive clitics in adnominal constructions, nonverbal possessive predicates in locational constructions) and peripheral means of coding possession (complex words and specific verbs of possession). Adnominal possessive constructions in Ket can be divided into constructions with an explicit possessor (it can either be a noun or a pronoun) and constructions with an implicit one. If a possessor is nonreferential, it is possible to use compounding which yields a complex word as a result. Predicative possessive constructions in the language distinguish between nonverbal locational constructions and constructions with specific verbs of possession. In the first case, a possessor is marked with the Adessive case marker, while the nonverbal possessive predicate (possessum) requires the presence of a copula. The nonpast tense copula is often omitted. In the second case, a possessum gets incorporated into a finite possessive verb. There is a clear dominating preference for using locational constructions to express possessive relations over the verbal ones in the language, which is the reason why there are no constructions of the latter type found in our text corpus. In addition, the analysis shows that various discourse-related factors may play an important role in choosing a particular possessive strategy in Ket. For instance, the use of a particular adnominal possessive construction seems to be connected with the possessor’s degree of activation in the preceding discourse: the more it is activated, the greater the probability of using an implicit possessor construction.

Keywords: possession, possessive predicates, referentiality, information structure, Ket, endangered Siberian languages

“Dulzon Readings Conference”: History and Modernity // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2023. Issue 4 (42). P. 159-162

Keywords: .