Word order variations and information structure in Ket: A corpus-based study
Final Report Abstract
The primary goal of the project is to provide a detailed analysis and description of word order variations and their interaction with information structure in Ket based on an annotated electronic corpus of the language. Ket is a severely endangered language spoken in Central Siberia, with fewer than 30 competent speakers remaining across all dialects. The majority of these speakers are over 70 years old, indicating that Ket is about to become a moribund language within the next decade. The topic of information structure has received limited attention in the existing literature on Ket, which has primarily focused on phonology and verbal morphology. Furthermore, despite the availability of a considerable number of Ket text materials collected over the past 50 years, the majority of these texts are predominantly presented in idiosyncratic Cyrillic-based transcriptions without glossing, and are only accessible in printed form. During the course of this project, I compiled an electronic corpus of Ket comprising approximately 25,000 tokens (~4,700 utterances). The corpus consists of published Ket texts as well as materials gathered during my own fieldwork, primarily focusing on the Southern Ket dialect. The published texts were mostly collected between 1955 and 1979 by linguists from Tomsk, Russia. They encompass all three Ket dialects and various genres of spoken discourse, including folk tales, life stories, and instructions. Through the analysis of approximately 3,800 utterances from the corpus, I selected 2238 clauses (815 transitive and 1423 intransitive ones) that have been annotated with respect to the roles of their arguments. The project’s findings have generally supported my initial hypothesis that Ket exhibits flexible word order, with SOV / SV word order being dominant. I have identified eight transitive word order variations and three intransitive variations in the surveyed corpus data. The analysis suggests that the position of overt arguments and their omission in Ket is pragmatically motivated, reflecting the organization of topic/comment in relation to the given/new structuring of the clause. Additionally, the corpus data clearly demonstrate that despite the significant influence of Russian, a language with a dominant SVO word order, Ket has maintained a high degree of verb-finality. Verb-final variations account for 94.95% of all transitive and intransitive cases (excluding variations with no overt arguments). The successful completion of this project has filled existing gaps in the description of Ket grammar and produced a valuable research asset in the form of an electronic corpus. This resource will undoubtedly stimulate and facilitate future studies on this unique language, while also providing a solid foundation for integrating Ket data into broader areas of areal, crosslinguistic, and typological research.
Publications
-
A Polysynthetic Language in Contact: The Case of Ket. GLOCAL Conference Proceedings, 1, 186-194. The GLOCAL Unit, SOAS University of London.
Nefedov, Andrey
-
Preserving Endangered Knowledge in a Dictionary: The Case of Ket. Anthropological Linguistics, 61(1), 103-113.
Kotorova, Elizaveta & Nefedov, Andrey
-
The Lord’s Prayer in Ket: A linguistic analysis. Rodnoy Yazyk 2, pp. 76-86
Nefedov, Andrey & Elena Kryukova
-
Ket texts. Annotated Folk Texts of Ob-Yenissei Area, vol. 6.
Kryukova, Elena & Andrey Nefedov
-
Besonderheiten des Kommunikationsverhaltens der indigenen sibirischen Völker (am Beispiel des Ketischen). In: Finnisch-Ugrische Mitteilungen, Bd. 45: 1-14
Kotorova, Elizaveta & Andrey Nefedov
-
Typologische Anpassung als Prozess der Zusammenfügung vom Eigenen und Fremden in der Sprache (am Beispiel des Ketischen). Andersheit – Fremdheit – Ungleichheit, 323-349. V&R unipress.
Kotorova, Elizaveta & Nefedov, Andrey
-
Language contact and areal convergence in North Asia. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 32(1), 108-132.
Nefedov, Andrey & Kotorova, Elizaveta
-
Ket. Clause Linkage in the Languages of the Ob-Yenisei Area, 209-247. BRILL.
Nefedov, Andrey
