Comparative Analysis of Semantic and Morphosyntactic Peculiarities of the Demonstratives in the Eastern Khanty and the Southern-Central Selkup Languages Victoria Vladimirovna Vorobeva

This research deals with semantic and morphosyntactic peculiarities of the demonstratives in two indigenous languages of Western Siberia: Khanty and Selkup. Comparative analysis of demonstratives is mainly based on the dialects of the Eastern Khanty and the Southern-Central Selkup languages. These dialects of Khanty and Selkup languages are less described and highly endangered. The speakers of the Eastern Khanty and Southern-Central Selkup, due to their mixed residence in area of the middle Ob river and some of its tributaries in Tomsk region, are supposed to have been being in the extended ‘cultural and linguistic contact’. The aim of our paper is to research similarities and differences in the deictic systems of the demonstratives in the described languages.


Introduction
Nowadays a majority of dialects of Khanty and Selkup languages are highly endangered.Comparative analysis of demonstratives is based on Eastern Khanty and Southern-Central Selkup dialects of Western Siberia.Despite Selkup and Khanty languages belong to different branch of Uralic language family (Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic), speakers of these languages are characterized by the extended cultural and linguistic contact in area of the middle Ob river and some of its tributaries in Tomsk region, mainly in Kargasokskiy and Parabelskiy districts.The object of this paper is semantic and morphsyntactic comparison of demonstratives in Eastern Khanty and Southern-Central Selkup dialects.
Theoretical and linguistic material is grounded on the following main sources: "Morphology of the Selkup language.Southern dialects", "Essays of the Selkup language.The Tazovskiy dialect" (1980), "Aspects of the Grammar of Eastern Khanty" (2010), "Essays of the dialects of Khanty.The Vakhovsky dialect", "Collection of annotated folklore and everyday texts of the Ob-Yenisey language area" (2012,2013).

Origin of demonstratives in Khanty and Selkup languages
Based on the chief function of demonstratives to establish joint attention, Dissel (2006) assumed that demonstratives may have emerged very early in the evolution of human language and independently of other linguistics terms.

Demonstrative of Northern Khanty
The example from the Sherkalskiy dialect: t ma k t ja w nš wets m (Radomski, 1989, p. 174).-'This summer I fished twelve white salmon'.

Spatial and temporal meaning of the demonstratives
Demonstratives belong to deictic expressions of the language.Firstly, the deictic features of demonstratives are characterized in spatial terms based on their relationship to the deictic centre.The deictic centre is defined by the speaker's location at the time of utterance.In Khanty and Selkup languages deictic words are egocentric.Eastern Khanty has two deictic pairs of demonstratives, contrasting proximal and distal referents, but in Southern-Central Selkup demonstratives indicate three different locations on a distance scale: proximal, medial, and distal.The sense of proximity or remoteness is explicit when terms are used contrastively.In Earstern Khanty language the first contrastive pair (vakh.tim(i) 'this' -tom( ) 'that', vas.tem(i) 'this' -tom( ) 'that') is uses for remarkable distance sense .For example, Khanty Vakh.tim iki lal'w l, tom iki am sw l (Gulay, 1966, p.138).-"This old man is sitting, that old man is standing".In Southern-Central Selkup two terms with different spatial meaning aw(na) 'that nearer' and to(na)~l 'that farer' are used in contrast to term taw(ga) 'this'.Look at the examples, Southern Selkup.taw qula tümbatti, aw qula kalatti (Bekker, 1995, p. 102).-'These people came, those people stayed'.taw mat šand, to mat t'ebi (Bekker, 1995. p.104).-'This house is new, that house is rotten'.However, in non-contrastive situation all demonstratives mentioned above save their inherent distance feature.In Eastern Khanty the second pare of demonstrative (t 'i(t) 'this' -t 'u(t) 'that') also indicates the location of the referent relative to the deictic centre.But there are situations where demonstratives t 'i(t) is changeable by t 'u(t).
The example from Vasjugan Khanty: t 'u m ata l nt s (Gulya, 1989, p. 568).-'In this pit she lay down'.As can be seen in the example, t 'u is rather interpreted as a proximal term than as a distal one.The Selkup demonstrative na and its derivative forms naw, nagwa has not got a comparative pare and carries neutral feature (Bekker, 1995, p. 105).
Though, demonstrative na is closer to some sense of proximity than to remoteness.Selkup Vasyugan na a a qut na kub l kud t elled t ellel mbad t nat eR t (Bajdak, 2013, p.187).-'This is not people, this is souls of died people (which) live there'.Northern Khanty employs three deictic terms: t m( )~ ( ), t m( )~( ) and (t).Two of them are organized in contrastive forms indicating proximal and distal referents (t m( )~ ( ) 'near speaker' -t m( )~( ) 'away from speaker').In non-contrastive situations they also carry an inherent location meaning.Khanty Sherkalskiy n uten, t m t t ja tl' t t a utt t (Radomski, 1989, p. 157).-'You know, these fish ten days live'.The demonstrative (t) is reserved for entities as near the speaker as away from speaker (Zhivotikov, 1942, p.7;Steinitz, 1937, p. 212;Rédei, 1968, p. 22).In Northern Khanty texts the demonstrative (t) is primarily met expressing proximal location of the referent to the speaker.Khanty Kazymskiy p rm s t ntam wo t t m ej t n (Rédei, 1968, p.32).-'These things keep in the museum'.In the next example from Khanty Kazymskiy text the term indicates distal referent to egocentric.
-oten wos k , t t t t an' pa t j s (Rédei, 1968, p. 33-34).-'In that yurta was cold, there was no place for fire'.Maybe earlier demonstrative (t) had the contrastive pair, because some scientists W. Steinitz (1950), L. Honti (1984) mark term ut 'away from speaker' in Sherkalskiy Khanty, which is used only independently.Unfortunately, I didn't succeed in meeting it in the available Northern Khanty texts.Thus, it is difficult to affirm existence of this form in nowadays Northern Khanty.To sum I believe that distance sense of the second comparative pare of Eastern Khanty demonstratives i(t) -u(t) 'that', Northern Khanty demonstrative (t) and Southern-Central Selkup na(wga) is sometimes vague.
The demonstratives of the described languages can be imported not only into spatial domain, but also into the temporal one.Time is more elusive concept than space.In general, time is commonly conceptualized as motion in space.Spatial deictics are able to function to place an event on the time line relative to the moment of the speech event or moment of the utterance.Thus, demonstrative can function as spatial as temporal deictics.Although, demonstratives usually lose some of their deictic force when they express temporal sense (Yakovleva, 2012, p. 152).There are examples of temporal deixis from Vakh Khanty: mä tim a k la jo pa nt m nl m (Gulya, 1966, p. 81).-'This year I don't go home'.t 'u al k lä r w l al (Tereshkin, 1961, p. 103).-'That year was very difficult'

The meaning of visibility of the demonstratives
In addition to distance, in Eastern Khanty the demonstratives indicate whether the referent is visible or invisible.In spite of the fact that visibility is not inherently deictic feature, in Eastern Khanty it is expressed by the same demonstrative terms.The first comparative pare is used for visible referent (vakh., vas. tim(i), tem(i) 'near speaker visible' -tom( ), tom( ) 'away from speaker visible') and the second comparative pare indicates the referent out-of-sight (vakh.-vas.i(t) 'near the speaker invisible' -u(t) 'far away from speaker invisible').I believe that due to the fact that the Vakh-Vasuygansky dialect is one of the most archaic (Collinder, 1960, p. 30;Décsy, 1965 p. 30;Bouda, 1972 p. 273), that's why its system is richer.This dialect preserves relict phenomena (such as an ergative structure, a higher number of cases and times, visibility feature of demonstratives) distinguishing it from the other Khanty dialects and languages of the same branch of Uralic family.K. Majtinskaya (1967) supposes that demonstratives' referring to visible/invisible objects in Eastern Khanty and some dialects of Saam language developed under influence of Nenets language, where pronoun tak characterizes visibility of referent (p.147).In the work "Essays of the Selkup language" (1980) authors made timid supposition that demonstrative tönna in tazovskiy dialect can indicate referent located very far from speaker and even invisible (p.294).Thus, it may be supposed that earlier Southern-Central Selkup demonstrative to(na) 'more remote' might have similar semantic feature, as for a long time Southern Selkups and Eastern Khanties have been having lingual and cultural contact.

Syntactic forms of the demonstratives
In the Southern-Central Selkup and the Eastern Khanty languages the demonstratives function as pronouns, that is independently or as nominal modifiers, that is in syntactic dependence from head nouns.Thus we can say about the demonstratives pronouns and demonstratives determiners.But in both cases of use the demonstratives are united by reference, needed to be relative to the referent.
According to the regularity of the Tazovsiy Northern Selkup dialect, adding the morpheme -my to the demonstratives in the independent function is obliged: tam -tam-my, t nna -t nna-my (Kuznezova, 1980, p. 295).
As in the Khanty language, the Selkup demonstratives in independent usage can be inflected for cases and numbers.Southern Selkup man tonanaR n aB rgu mel'l'eb'e (Bekker, 1995, p. 107).-'I those (two people) food gave'.
Thus using independently the Khanty and Northern Selkup demonstratives are regularly marked by special fixed suffixes.Inflection of the demonstratives rarely takes place in Khanty and Selkup.In Selkup there are no special suffixes for building independent forms of the demonstratives but those which used only independently have longer forms.

Cases of anaphoric use of the demonstratives
It is worth noting that the demonstratives pronouns in the described languages using independently can be met in anaphoric usage.Demonstratives occur in anaphoric and deictic uses.Surely, anaphoric uses are based on deictic ones (Paducheva, 2001, 133-136).In the deictic use demonstratives focus on a concrete referent, for instance, Vakh Khanty sö s w l al. mä t 'i sö sn kä klask nn on lt l al m (Gulya, 1966, p. 136).-'It was autumn.In this autumn I studied in my first year'.Anaphoric demonstratives function to shift the interlocutors' attention on a referent in previous context.Kazymskiy Northern Khanty tu a m t'na t j , it w n ir urasup (Kaksin, 2014, p. 183).The example shows that the demonstrative it is referential with the previous context tu a m t'na t j .'A sweep-net has a purse; this is

Table 1 .
Demonstratives of Eastern Khanty