Historically Problematic Morphosyntactic Features in Uralic Languages

Sinopsis

The introductory chapter 1 of this book addresses the question of a novel approach to the history of Uralic – Finno-Ugric and Samoyed – languages. The investigations clearly show that among the reconstructed Proto-Uralic structural features by far not all belong to common Uralic. A large number of them find equivalents in the neighbouring non-Uralic languages. Chapter 2 is dedicated the problematics of some Uralic morphosyntactic features. The author has namely regarded as reliable that the genitive with the suffix -n has actually been one of the earliest Uralic object cases. Uralic languages are accusativeless because in those languages there is no individual case form for a direct object. The primary determinator of the choice between the indefinite/definite conjugations in Uralic languages was intransitivity/transitivity. Discrimination of indefinite/definite conjugations and concomitant reference to the number of the objects as well as to a person of the object in the verbal forms are phenomenon that is inherent to the whole of Northern Siberia and, besides Uralic languages occur in a number of Paleosiberian languages. In case of Uralic verbal personal k-markers we can probably come across very little etymologically common suffix-material inherent to all Uralic languages and at times they may prove to be of Turkic origin altogether. It may be supposed that a non-personal general-definitive function has always been inherent to the Uralic 3rd person possessive suffix.

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