LINGUIST List 17.2635

Sat Sep 16 2006

Books: Morphology/Typology: Künnap

Editor for this issue: Maria Moreno-Rollins <marialinguistlist.org>

Directory         1.    Ulrich Lueders, Historically Problematic Morphosyntactic Features in Uralic Languages: Künnap
Message 1: Historically Problematic Morphosyntactic Features in Uralic Languages: Künnap
Date: 15-Sep-2006
From: Ulrich Lueders <lincom.europat-online.de>
Subject: Historically Problematic Morphosyntactic Features in Uralic Languages: Künnap


Title: Historically Problematic Morphosyntactic Features in Uralic
Languages Series Title: LINCOM Studies in Asian Linguistics 69 Published: 2006 Publisher: Lincom GmbH
                http://www.lincom.at

Author: Ago Künnap, University of Tartu Paperback: ISBN: 3895864935 Pages: 96 Price: Europe EURO 44.00
Abstract:

The introductory chapter 1 of this book addresses the question of a novelapproach to the history of Uralic - Finno-Ugric and Samoyed - languages.The investigations clearly shows that among the reconstructed Proto-Uralicstructural features by far not all belong to common Uralic, at the sametime, a large number of them find equivalents in the neighbouringnon-Uralic languages. Chapter 2 is dedicated the problematics of someUralic morphosyntactic features.

The author has namely regarded as reliable that the genitive with thesuffix -n has actually been one of the earliest Uralic object cases. Uraliclanguages are accusativeless because in those languages there is noindividual case form for a direct object. The primary determinator of thechoice between the indefinite/definite conjugations in Uralic languages wasintransitivity/transitivity. Discrimination of indefinite/definiteconjugations and concomitant reference to the number of the objects as wellas to a person of the object in the verbal forms are phenomenon that isinherent to the whole of Northern Siberia and, besides Uralic languagesoccur in a number of Paleosiberian languages.

In case of Uralic verbal personal k-markers we can probably come acrossvery little etymologically common suffix-material inherent to all Uraliclanguages and at times they may prove to be of Turkic origin altogether. Itmay be supposed that a non-personal general-definitive function has alwaysbeen inherent to the Uralic 3rd person possessive suffix.

An unexpected feature in several Uralic languages is the lack of theFinnish type of the pronominal genitive attribute of the possessive suffix(minun lauluni 'my my-song', cf. the Estonian type without a possessivesuffix in minu laul 'my song'). It need not necessarily always indicate theretreat of the use of possessive suffixes as is usually supposed. Inchapter 3 is shown that neither does it exclude the possibility ofsupposing an eastern specific relationship of Livonian via an onetimebroken Finno-Ugric linguistic chain.

Chapter 4 demonstrates that it would be more discreet to admit that theorigin of the Ugric t-locative, l-ablative and Hungarian k-plural is notknown, however, it is hardly probable that they should have a generalFinno-Ugric background.

Linguistic Field(s): Morphology                             Typology Language Family(ies): Uralic
Written In: English (eng )

See this book announcement on our website: http://linguistlist.org/get-book.html?BookID=21177


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