Evidentiality in Dialects of Khanty
Evidentiality in Dialects of Khanty

Summary/Abstract: Evidentiality is marked grammatically in the northern Khanty dialects Obdorsk, Synja, and Kazym. Verbs that express evidential modality take the same form as the verbal participle (the derivational morpheme t marks the present participle, and m marks the past participle) with a possessive suffix. When it appears as a predicate, the verb becomes finite. It is used in modern spoken Khanty when the speaker is not an eyewitness but is informed of an event from secondhand sources. Evidentiality modality is marked by the morpheme t in the present and m in the past. In eastern dialects participles appear as predicates only in songs, not in the spoken language. In mythical songs as well as other songs, verbal participles appear with possessive suffixes as finite verbs, with t marking present participles and m marking past participles. These verb forms do not express evidentiality; they simply mark a ­stylistic difference between literary usage (in songs) and everyday language. The participle as a finite verb appears in even the oldest Khanty folklore texts from the 19th century, but since there is no information about the spoken language of that time, we cannot know whether these forms were used to express evidentiality. Using Eastern Khanty as a comparison, it can be inferred that the verbalization of participles began in songs, and in Northern Khanty it became used to express the evidential mode. It is unclear why this process did not occur in Eastern Khanty. In the eastern dialect Surgut, evidentiality is expressed by the use of a postpositional form of the participle. The participle + possessive suffix + postposition ’place’ structure appears sentence-finally, in the position of the predicate, and the process of postpositional agglutination has already begun.

• Details
• Contents