Email this article DISTRIBUTION OF COMPLEMENTIZERS IN THE URMI VARIETIES OF URMIYA
- Authors: Zabelina E.A.1
-
Affiliations:
- Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences
- Issue: No 2 (2022)
- Pages: 22-33
- Section: LINGUISTICS
- URL: https://bakhtiniada.ru/2307-6119/article/view/270108
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.23951/2307-6119-2022-2-22-33
- ID: 270108
Cite item
Full Text
Abstract
The aim of the paper is to analyze the complementizer distribution in Urmi, a North Eastern Neo-Aramaic variety, as spoken nowadays in the village of Urmiya, Krasnodar Krai (Russia). The families of Urmi speakers mostly come from Iran, Armenia and Georgia, so the system of complement-marking in their varieties is compared to the patterns of the respective regional Urmi varieties, reported in the literature. The Urmi varieties in Urmiya display a variation in complementizer marking that is not directly accounted for by the initial dialectal division. Urmiya varieties also display some innovations. For instance, semantic contrasts in complements of perception verbs can be expressed by interrogative manner words: this pattern, even though typologically expectable, has so far been unattested in Urmi. The distribution of complementizers in the subjunctive has a functional basis, at least in elicited data: different-subject constructions tend to be more frequently introduced by a complementizer than same-subject constructions. I show that several of the innovations can be accounted for, or at least favoured by contact influence. The contact influence of Russian on complementation manifests as instances of both matter- and pattern-borrowing, but does not go deeper than complementizer marking and, probably, word order permutations. Thus, the distribution of complementizers in the Urmi of Urmiya is different from the distributions reported in the literature for Urmi of other regions, which reflects the fact that complement-marking is more prone to contact influence and innovations than deeper layers of syntax and morphology.
About the authors
Elizaveta Aleksandrovna Zabelina
Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences
Email: windmill161@gmail.com
9 Tuchkov lane, St. Petersburg, Russia, 199053
References
- Boye, Kasper, & Petar Kehayov (eds.). 2016. Complementizer semantics in European languages. De Gruyter Mouton.
- Chappell, Hilary. 2008. Variation in the grammaticalization of complementizers from verba dicendi in Sinitic languages. Linguistic Typology. 12. 10.1515/LITY.2008.032.
- Coghill, Eleanor. 1999. The Verbal system of North Eastern Neo-Aramaic, Dissertation for the M.Phil. Degree, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge.
- Cristofaro, Sonia. 2003. Subordination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Cristofaro, Sonia. 2014. Complementation hierarchies and the development of complement constructions. Paper presented at the workshop ‘Clausal complementation and (non)factivity’, DGfS, Marburg (5 March 2014).
- Givó n, Thomas. 1980. The binding hierarchy and the typology of complements. Studies in language. V. 4. № 3.
- Dik, Simon C. & Kees Hengeveld. 1991. The hierarchical structure of the clause and the typology of perception-verb complements. Linguistics, 29 (2), 231–259. De Gruyter Mouton.
- Dixon, Robert M. W. & Aleksandra Y. Aikhenvald (eds.). 2006. Complementation. Oxford University Press.
- Heine, Bernd & Tania Kuteva. 2002. World lexicon of grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Karttunen, Lauri. 1971. Some Observations on Factivity. Pap. Linguist. 4, 55–69.
- Khan, Geoffrey. 2016a. The Neo-Aramaic Dialect of the Assyrian Christians of Urmi. Vol 1. Grammar: phonology and morphology. Brill, Leiden.
- Khan, Geoffrey. 2016b. The Neo-Aramaic Dialect of the Assyrian Christians of Urmi. Vol 2. Grammar: syntax. Brill, Leiden.
- Khan, Geoffrey. 2016d. The Neo-Aramaic Dialect of the Assyrian Christians of Urmi. Vol 4. Texts. Brill, Leiden.
- König, Ekkehard. 2015. Manner deixis as source of grammatical markers in Indo-European languages. In Carlotta Viti (ed.), Perspectives on historical syntax, 33–60. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Lehmann, Christian. 2019. Christian Lehmann’s personal website. URL : https://www.christianlehmann.eu/ling/lg_system/sem/index.html?https://www.christianlehmann.eu/ling/lg_system/sem/proposition_state_of_affairs.html
- Lyavdansky, Alexey et al. Christian Urmi Corpus. (Available online at: neo-aramaic.web-corpora.net/urmi_corpus/search).
- Matras, Yaron. 1998. Utterance modifiers and universals of grammatical borrowing. Linguistics, 36, 281–331.
- Meyerhoff, Miriam. 2002. All the same? The emergence of complementizers in Bislama. In T. Güldemann, and M. von Roncador (eds), Reported Discourse. A meeting ground for different linguistic domains. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 341–363.
- Noonan, Michael. Complementation. In Shopen T. (ed.). Language Typology and Syntactic Description. V. 2: Complex Constructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. P. 52–151.
- Schmidtke-Bode, Karsten. 2014. Complement clauses and complementation systems: A cross-linguistic study of grammatical organization. Doctoral dissertation, Thüringer Universitäts-und Landesbibliothek Jena.
- Staum, Laura. 2005. When Stylistic and Social Effects Fail to Converge: a variation study of complementizer choice. Ms., Stanford University.
- Thomason, Sarah G. & Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization and genetic linguistics. Berkeley University of California Press.
- Treis, Yvonne & Martine Vanhove (eds.). 2017. Similative and equative constructions: A cross-linguistic perspective (Vol. 117). John Benjamins.
- Zabelina, Elizaveta. 2017. Morfosintaksis sentencial’nyh aktantov pri predikate ‘xotet’’ v urmijskom novoaramejskom [Morphosyntax of complements of the verb ‘want’ in Urmi Neo-Aramaic]. In Zabelina, Logvinova (eds.). Semnadtsataya Konferentsiya po tipologii i grammatike dlya molodykh issledovateley. Tezisy dokladov [17th Conference on Typology and Grammar for Young Scholars. Abstracts] (Saint Petersburg, 19–21 November 2020). St. Petersburg: Institute for Linguistic Studies, RAS. 42–45.
Supplementary files
