Functional-Pragmatic Perspective on Clause Argument Case-Marking in Eastern Khanty.
The paper outlines the types of discourse-pragmatic functions and kinds of propositional-semantic content associated with the Loc-marked Agent constructions in Eastern Khanty. Selected methodology includes contrastive morpho-syntactic and contextual analysis of the narrative corpus, attending to the information structure and linguistic meta-data. Based on discourse analysis, it is hypothesized, that a wide cognitive faculty facilitating the structuring of information and specifying the roles of the participants, governs the choice of grammatical means, i.e. the construction types. It follows from the analysis of pragmatic, semantic and grammatical features of interacting discourse participants that specific system’s grammatical resources identify with certain pragmatic-semantic properties. The Loc-Agent constructions are prototypically used to express the events with more than one argument with competing topicality. The Loc-Agent constructions (agented passive and “ergative”) manifest a parenthetical shift in centrality of the discourse referents, where a secondary topic referent is competing with the primary agentive topic. This is expressed by temporary promotion of the secondary topical referent to the Loc-marked S grammatical relation. N.V. Polyakova. The Concept ‘Home’ and its Linguistic Representation in Selkup and Russian. The article considers peculiarities of linguistic representation of the concept “Home” in Selkup in comparison with Russian.
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Issue: 4, 2006
Series of issue: Humanities (Philology: Indo-European and Siberian languages)
Rubric: Siberian Languages
Pages: 140 — 147
Downloads: 1462