The influence of internal possessors on argument coding in Northern Khanty

The study examines contexts in Northern Khanty where the presence of internal possessors in the noun phrases of the core arguments influences their morphosyntactic coding. Based on the corpus data from the Kazym dialect of Khanty, I investigate contexts in which the presence of a third-person topical possessor in the agent or patient NP leads to agent demotion and passivization. The article provides an analysis of these contexts in terms of the interaction between discourse prominence and processing efficiency. It is demonstrated that passive voice is used as an ambiguity-resolving strategy when several unmarked participants are present in the clause, or when referential conflict may arise due to unclear reference of an anaphoric possessive marker. This strategy applies whenever the agent is less prominent than either the patient or the possessor of the patient, or whenever both possessors of the agent and the patient are present, and both core arguments are low on animacy, agentivity, and topicality hierarchies, in which case passivization is due not to their relative prominence but rather to considerations of processing efficiency.