POSSESSIVE RELATIONS IN KET: PROTOTYPICAL CONSTRUCTIONS AND PERIPHERAL CASES
DOI: 10.23951/2307-6119-2017-4-42-55
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
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Issue: 4, 2017
Series of issue: Issue 4
Rubric: LINGUISTICS
Pages: 42 — 55
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