Article

Name: Locational phrase as a means of expressing spatial relations in Surgut Khanty

Authors: Ilya M. Plotnikov

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

Abstract:

The paper is concerned with examining locational phrases (localizers) that constitute a common structural component of all spatial sentence types in Surgut Khanty. As a result of surveying a corpus mainly consisting of folklore and fictional texts, as well as an experimental study, 10 types of locational phrases have been identified, each characterized by specific properties in terms of structure, semantics, and their interaction.

From the point of view of semantics, these phrases tend to express three components of spatial situation: one of its participants (reference object) and two aspects of the relation it is involved in characterizing the position occupied by objects in relation to each other (topology) and its transformation with time (dynamicity). Although these meanings may be expressed by distinct morphological components of a locational phrase as exemplified by noun phrases with serial postpositions, there are cases in which some of them are implicit or combined within one morpheme with the expression of dynamic aspect being the most regular. In terms of L. Talmy’s typology, this suggests that locational phrases are used to encode at least some aspects of Path, which corresponds to the topology and dynamicity in our analysis.

The expression of spatial relationships is achieved by two types of specialized structural components, which are often used in combination: 1) stems that primarily denote basic types of topology; 2) derivational and inflectional affixes, most notably associated with morphological cases, which constitute uniform series of oppositions across several types of locational phrases.

Keywords: spatial relations, locational phrase, Surgut Khanty

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