Typology of Negation in Obugric and Samoyedic

The goal of the project proposed here is to examine, describe and provide a typological classification of the linguistic realizations of negation in a number of seriously endangered Samoyedic (Nenets, Enets, Selkup, Nganasan and Kamass, the latter extinct since the late 1980s) and Ob-Ugric minority languages (Khanty and Mansi), spoken in Europe and Siberia. This classification will also provide important insights into syntactic typology. Typological, syntactic and semantic aspects of negation have been intensely researched areas of linguistics in recent decades. In contrast to the fast accumulating data obtained from the investigation of major European and a few non-European languages, only little attention has been paid to languages with small speaker communities and little literary use, among them minor Uralic languages. Nevertheless, these languages, as indicated for example by previous work of this project, exhibit untypical and not well-documented negation constructions. The negation constructions shall be classified applying current theories of linguistic typology so that the results could serve as a basis for further cross-linguistic comparison. In order to provide firm empirical grounds both for our present research and for further studies concerning other aspects of these languages, we shall compile electronic corpora containing a considerable amount of annotated text for each of these languages. Further research (also the research of other, Uralic and non-Uralic languages will be carried forward by the typological system that will be worked out during the project as well as by the created corpus.

The goal of the project proposed here is to examine, describe and provide a typological classification of the linguistic realizations of negation in a number of seriously endangered Samoyedic (Nenets, Enets, Selkup, Nganasan and Kamass, the latter extinct since the late 1980s) and Ob-Ugric minority languages (Khanty and Mansi), spoken in Europe and Siberia. This classification will also provide important insights into syntactic typology. Typological, syntactic and semantic aspects of negation have been intensely researched areas of linguistics in recent decades. In contrast to the fast accumulating data obtained from the investigation of major European and a few non-European languages, only little attention has been paid to languages with small speaker communities and little literary use, among them minor Uralic languages. Nevertheless, these languages, as indicated for example by previous work of this project, exhibit untypical and not well-documented negation constructions. The negation constructions shall be classified applying current theories of linguistic typology so that the results could serve as a basis for further cross-linguistic comparison. In order to provide firm empirical grounds both for our present research and for further studies concerning other aspects of these languages, we shall compile electronic corpora containing a considerable amount of annotated text for each of these languages. Further research (also the research of other, Uralic and non-Uralic languages will be carried forward by the typological system that will be worked out during the project as well as by the created corpus.