Article

Name: Communicative variation of the typical syntactic structure of motion in the Surgut dialect of the Khanty language

Authors: Ilya M. Plotnikov

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Linguistics

Abstract:

The standard syntactic structure of motion comprises three elements referred to in this paper as subject, localizer, and predicate. The proto-typical meaning of this structure is represented by simple sentences of motion. This paper examines 144 realizations of this structure selected from a collection of texts of different genres and idioms to examine its communicative variation in the Surgut dialect of the Khanty language. Three main variations of the structure have been identified, with allowance for both constituent order and intonation structure. The first variant is found in contexts describing the activity of a specified subject, with the subject being the theme of the utterance and the localizer and predicate representing its rheme. The other two are used when a particular situation is presented as an event unfolding against a specified localizer, with the communicative roles of the subject and the localizer reversed. While both of the latter were found with various types of localizers, the data suggest a substantial preference for using one of them with typical noun phrases and the other with preverbs, adverbs, and adverbial pronouns. Several cases of using a typical syntactic structure of motion at the beginning of texts have been identified, illustrating a tendency to present events from the subject's perspective when there is no contextual stimulus to warrant adopting the opposite perspective. The findings of the study reveal the similarities in communicative variation patterns between typical structures of motion and existence.

Keywords: Khanty language, typical syntactic structure of motion, communicative paradigm, con-stituent order

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