Article

Name: Reflexes of adjectival suffix *-lʲ: -l / -lʲ, -j / -i in Selkup dialects: a synchronic and diachronic perspective

Authors: Sergei V. Kovylin

Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the RAS, Moscow, Russia; Tomsk State Pedagogical University, Tomsk, Russia

In the section Фонетика

Abstract:

This paper examines the variation of the reflexes of the adjectival suffix*-lʲ ˃ -l / -lʲ, -j / -i in the southern, transitional, central, and northern Selkup dialects from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. This isogloss constitutes one of the principal phonetic criteria used in the internal zonal classification of the Selkup linguistic territory. The study draws on corpus data comprising over 42,000 tokens, accessed via the Lingvodoc linguistic platform and personal archives (FieldWorks Language Explorer files), as well as published scholarly sources on the Selkup language. The analysis demonstrates that the geographic variation of* lʲ reflexes represents a more complex and heterogeneous phonetic phenomenon than previously assumed. It is shown that the shift *-lʲ ˃ -j / i in the central dialect area is attested only sporadically and exclusively in the Narym dialect. In the southern dialects, this transition is close to completion, while in the transitional and northern zones it remains at an intermediate stage. In the southern and transitional dialects, the markers -l / -lʲ are predominantly attested at morpheme boundaries within compound lexemes and before postpositions, which is interpreted as a residual pattern. Diachronic comparison of sources reveals a higher frequency of the markers -l / lʲ in 19th-century materials from both the southern and northern dialects, followed by a moderate decline in the 20th–21st centuries. This variation points to a gradual and continuous diachronic shift *-lʲ ˃ -j / -i across Selkup dialects.

Keywords: adjective suffix, phonetic dialectological criteria, Selkup dialects

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