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THE PROBLEM OF PRESENTING ETHNOCULTURAL REALIA IN A MINORITY LANGUAGE DICTIONARY (THE CASE OF KET) // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2016. Issue 3 (13). P. 24-32

Describing culture-specific vocabulary is an important and at the same time rather challenging part of lexicographic work. In particular, this concerns making dictionaries of minority languages that are considered to be endangered. As a rule, these languages are understudied and not sufficiently documented, which complicates presentation of ethnocultural realia to a greater extent. One of such languages is Ket, an endangered language spoken by a small number of people residing in the north of Krasnoyarsk province. The present article describes the main problems related to presenting ethnocultural material that were encountered in the course of making the Comprehensive Ket dictionary. Among them are 1) cultural differences in categorization of extralinguistic reality, 2) presentation of ethnocultural c information in a dictionary entry, 3) loss of ethnocultural knowledge in the language community.

Keywords: Ket, minority languages, endangered languages, Siberian languages, lexicography, ethnocultural vocabulary, dictionary

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

NEGATION OF NONVERBAL PREDICATES IN KET // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2018. Issue 1 (19). P. 20-40

The present study deals with nonverbal predicate constructions and strategies used to negate them in Ket. The types of nonverbal predicates discussed in the article include nominal (inclusive and equative), attributive and locative (locative (proper), existential, and possessive) constructions. The strategies employed to negate each predicate type are analyzed with respect to morphosyntatic and paradigmatic symmetry / asymmetry they display as opposed to their affirmative counterparts, as well as whether these strategies differ from the standard negation in the language. Particular attention is paid to a special subtype of negative existential predicates that has features typical for the locative (proper) type of nonverbal predicates. The results of the study are meant to supplement the ongoing areal and typological research of negation in nonverbal predicative constructions.

Keywords: Ket, negation, nonverbal predicates, locative constructions, existential constructions, possessive constructions, endangered languages, Siberian languages, typology