The ongoing eclipse of possessive suffixes in North Saami
A case study in reduction of morphological complexity
North Saami is replacing the use of possessive suffixes on nouns with a morphologically simpler analytic construction. Our data (>2K examples culled from >.5M words) track this change through three generations, covering parameters of semantics, syntax and geography. Intense contact pressure on this minority language probably promotes morphological simplification, yielding an advantage for the innovative construction. The innovative construction is additionally advantaged because it has a wider syntactic and semantic range and is indispensable, whereas its competitor can always be replaced. The one environment where the possessive suffix is most strongly retained even in the youngest generation is in the Nominative singular case, and here we find evidence that the possessive suffix is being reinterpreted as a Vocative case marker.
Keywords: possessive suffix, North Saami, vocative, morphological simplification, minority language, language contact
Published online: 15 November 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.33.3.02jan
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.33.3.02jan
References
References
Abuladze, Lia & Andreas Ludden
Aikio, Ante, Laura Arola & Niina Kunnas
Andersen, Henning
Antonsen, Lene, Laura A. Janda & Berit Anne Bals Baal
2012 Njealji davvisámi adposišuvnna geavahus. The use of four North Saami adpositions. Sámi dieđalaš áigečála 2012(2). 7–38. Online at: http://site.uit.no/aigecala/sda-2-2012-antonsen-ja-janda-ja-baal/
Antonsen, Lene & Laura A. Janda
Baayen, Harald R., Anna Endresen, Laura A. Janda, Anastasia Makarova & Tore Nesset
Bentz, Christian & Bodo Winter
Bethin, Christina Y.
Blythe, Richard A. & William Croft
Daniel, Michael & Andrew Spencer
Endresen, Anna, Laura A. Janda, Robert Reynolds & Francis M. Tyers
Fink, Robert O.
Grömping, Ulrike
Hill, Virginia
Hoek, Karen van
Jakobson, Roman O.
Janda, Laura A.
Janda, Laura A., Lene Antonsen & Berit Anne Bals Baal
2014 A Radial Category Profiling Analysis of North Sámi Ambipositions. In Benjamin Anible, Keiko Beers, Laura Hirrel & Deborah Wager (eds.), High Desert Linguistics Society Proceedings, 10. Online at: http://linggraduate.unm.edu/HDLS10Proceedings.html
Kaškin, E.V.
Kilgarriff, Adam
Kiparsky, Valentin
Lass, Roger
McWhorter, John H.
Michael, Lev
Mühlhäusler, Peter
Nesset, Tore & Laura A. Janda
Nielsen, Konrad
Nikolaeva, Irina
2003 Possessive affixes as markers of information structuring: Evidence from Uralic. In Pirkko Suihkonen & Bernard Comrie (eds.), International symposium on deictic systems and quantification in languages spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia, 130–145. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology and Udmurt State University.
Polinsky, Maria
R Development Core Team
(2008) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. ISBN 3-900051-07-0, Online at: http://www.R-project.org.
Sonnenhauser, Barbara & Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna
Stassen, Leon
2013 Predicative possession. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Online at: http://wals.info/chapter/117, Accessed on 2016-06-15.
Strobl, Carolin, James Malley, & Gerhard Tutz
Trudgill, Peter
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Devylder, Simon
Janda, A. Laura & M. Francis Tyers
Janda, Laura A.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 03 march 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.