Against monosemic approaches to Northern Khanty extended possessives

Stepan Mikhailov
National Research University Higher School of Economics

Abstract. In this paper I discuss two kinds of extended uses of Kazym Northern Khanty possessive markers: the topical uses of poss.2sg and the partitive uses of poss.3sg. I argue that the unification of these extended uses with the proper possessive use is generally impossible and that the only feasible approach to these data is a radical polysemy one, which proposes an independent semantics for each use type. I discuss two monosemic approaches after [Nikolaeva 2003] and [Simonenko 2017] and discard them in view of a range of arguments for the independence of the extended uses based on the latter’s distinct morphosyntactic and pragmatic behavior. The arguments can easily be extended to the data from other Uralic languages with extended possessive marking.

Keywords: extended possessives, Northern Khanty, monosemic approach, polysemy, agreement mismatch, semantics

For citation: Mikhailov S. Against monosemic approaches to Northern Khanty extended possessives. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2021. Vol. 4, iss. 1. Pp. 118–146. (In Rus.)