Person-number asymmetry: Agreement of passive miratives in Kazym Khanty
Aleksey Starchenko1, Svetlana Toldova2
1,2HSE University
Abstract: The study focuses on a previously unrecorded model of split agreement in the mirative paradigm in Kazym Khanty. Split agreement is found when comparing active and passive mirative constructions, as well as in a limited set of uses of non-finite forms. In the passive voice, unlike the active voice, the 3rd person is unmarked and the subject only agrees in number. At the same time, the agreement markers of the 1st and 2nd persons are the same regardless of the diathesis. In other paradigms of the Khanty verb, in particular, in the subject and object indicative, the split is not observed. The work characterizes in detail the identified agreement model, matching its fragments with those of other inflectional paradigms of Kazym Khanty: subject and object conjugations of the indicative, possessive paradigm and nominal number markers. The study puts forward a hypothesis that for full-fledged, non-defective person agreement, the Khanty nominal group must have either a sufficiently high syntactic position (external argument), or a full set of person features, which are possessed by 1–2 person pronouns. The work also examines the Khanty data in the light of the typology of split agreement.
Keywords: split agreement, person asymmetry, mirative, Northern Khanty, Uralic languages
For citation: Starchenko A., Toldova S. Person-number asymmetry: Agreement of passive miratives in Kazym Khanty. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2023. Vol. 6, iss. 1. Pp. 130–148. (In Rus.) doi:10.37632/PI.2023.77.59.006