Northern Khanty possessives and determiner typology

Abstract

In many Uralic languages, possessive agreement markers form a special determiner system. Following several studies that argue that Uralic possessives have been grammaticalized as determiners, the present study (based on original field data) describes the semantics of four such determiners in the Kazym dialect of Northern Khanty and sets them against the background of recent investigations of typology and the theory of determiner semantics. Although these determiners involve well-known semantic features (familiarity, uniqueness, sa‑ lience, partitivity, intensional rigidity), some of the combinations of these features observed in Northern Khanty appear to be previously unattested among the world’s languages. For instance, I claim that in Northern Khanty, there are definite possessive markers, as well as a determiner that marks the most salient referent. In other cases, the Northern Khanty data confirm the findings of my predecessors, with the only difference being that in their data the relevant oppositions are found in expressions unrelated to possessives. Thus, this study contributes to determiner typology and to field-based semantic research in the languages of Russia, continuing the direction of Uralic studies started by [Nikolaeva 2003; Fraurud 2001; Kuznetsova 2003].