Semantics of the Northern Khanty Salient Article: Definiteness, salience, and obviation


2024. №1, 7-38

Stepan K. Mikhailov
HSE University, Moscow, Russia; stepanmihajlov@gmail.com

Abstract:

Uralic possessive agreement markers often function as determiners. This paper presents a case study of the Northern Khanty (Kazym dialect) 2SG Possessive that developed into a “salient article”. The Salient Article is definite as it requires informational uniqueness and familiarity, but its distribution is narrower than the distribution of previously described definite determiner types. It is most commonly used with topical Subjects and in noun phrases with demonstratives, but its use is not obligatory across the board in these cases and is not limited to them. Furthermore, the Salient Article is subject to a constraint that is similar to the proximate uniqueness constraint of languages with obviation systems like the Algonquian: there may be at most one noun phrase with a Salient Article per clause (with the exception of noun phrases with demonstratives). I consider and reject two possible syntactic accounts of such distribution and instead propose a tentative semantic analysis that derives all the observed facts: the Salient Article marks the most salient discourse referent in the given context. (I understand salience as a graded property that a referent has to the extent that the referent is being attended to by the addressee following Roberts and Barlew). This study thus supplies another argument for the hypothesis that salience is an important dimension to determiner semantics cross-linguistically.

Keywords
article
determination
definiteness
Khanty
Northern Khanty
obviation
possession
salience
Uralic

For citation:

Mikhailov S. K. Semantics of the Northern Khanty Salient Article: Definiteness, salience, and obviation. Voprosy Jazykoznanija, 2024, 1: 7–38.

Acknowledgements:

The results of the project “Constituent structure and interpretation in the grammatical architecture of the languages of Russia”, carried out within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University) in 2023, are presented in this work. First of all, I want to thank our Khanty friends, who have unceasingly put great effort into working with our team, teaching us Khanty, and inspiring us with their enthusiasm and wisdom. I am deeply indebted to them. Several colleagues have supervised, guided, or commented on various stages of this work, that is, Svetlana Toldova, Alexey Kozlov, Natalia Ivlieva, Alexandra Simonenko, Polina Pleshak, and Natalia Slioussar. I am grateful for their help. I also want to thank for useful comments and suggestions my colleagues from the HSE’s Laboratory of Formal Models in Linguistics and from the Khanty field trip team, as well as the audiences of the 18th Conference on Typology and Grammar for Young Scholars and the Ph.D. seminar of the Doctoral School of Philology at the HSE University (Moscow). Finally, I thank Alina Russkikh, whose help and encouragement were instrumental in finishing this paper, and, again, Alexey Kozlov, whose extensive comments to the first draft of the paper had made it that much better, as well as two anonymous reviewers and an editor for Voprosy Jazykoznanija, whose suggestions also helped improve the paper. All errors remaining are my own.