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ON THE ARGUMENT STRUCTURE OF THE ‘GIVE’ VERBS IN NGANASAN AND IN SELKUP // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2013. Issue 1 (1). P. 27-37

The verb ‘to give’ belongs to the group of the so-called ditransitive verbs. The verb's behaviour can firstly be investigated based on the argument structure, that is how the recipient and the theme, i.e. the object, are coded by the language. Secondly, this phenomenon can also be studied regarding the form of the verb. This work will focus on this point of view, but the form of the two arguments will also be discussed. There are two verbs with the meaning ’to give’ in the Samoyedic languages. Despite the distinction in meaning there is a strong tendency in the distribution of the two verbs determined by the person of the receiver, which is well reflected in the reconstruction of the verbs. A distribution similar to the one in Nganasan can be detected in the Enets, the Nenets and the Selkup languages.

Keywords: Nganasan, Selkup, ditransitive construction

DERIVATIONAL SUFFIXES AS/OR CLASSIFIERS? – THE WORD-FORMATION OF THE NGANASAN ADJECTIVES // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2014. Issue 4 (6). P. 49-58

The Nganasan langauge is rich in adjectival suffixes. Some of the adjectival suffixes simply have been considered as derivational suffixes of “adjectiveness” without any further function, however several earlier studies on the Nganasan language have previously mentioned some correlations of certain semantic domains and the morphology of their terms. The paper provides deeper analysis of the linguistic data and depicts its typological parallels and uniqueness. The domains referring value and age seem to appear as a part of the domain of physical characteristics and because of the low number of its members they have not became subjects of consideration. The correlation between domains and suffixes are not exclusive, e.g.: suffix of colour also occurs in dimension and physical characteristics, e.g. kolsajkuə ‘long’ etc. Suffixes -əgə and ńəəgə clearly cover their own domain. Among the causes of the overlapings the different productivity of the suffixes, the different degrees of semantic transparency of the derivated forms and the unclear origin of the suffixes with their unclear etymology can also be mentioned. Although the correlations are strong and show strict tendencies, the suffixes can not been considered as classifiers because they dominate only their “own” domain, but not exclusively.

Keywords: Nganasan, adjectives, derivation

LINGUISTICALLY ANNOTATED SPOKEN NGANASAN CORPUS // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2015. Issue 2 (8). P. 25-34

The paper discusses the key issues of the annotation method employed in the project “Lingustically annotated spoken Nganasan corpus”. The data are processed and stored in the EXMARaLDA format. The annotation of the database involves grammatical and part-of-speech tagging (made in Toolbox or Flex), translation into Russian and English. However, the present paper addresses the questions of syntactic roles, and information structure. For this purpose we use the format designed by other researchers and adapted by us to the Nganasan language. In the paper we describe the system of annotation (tags, terms and their clarification) illustrated by a large amount of Nganasan examples.

Keywords: Nganasan, annotation, corpus, endangered language, language documentation