Continuity of information structuring strategies in Eastern Khanty

The paper addresses the issue of cohesive units in language at the level of grammatical inventory. Based on analysis of discourse-pragmatic functions and propositional-semantic content, I illustrate the continuity in formal morphosyntactic means available in the system that are used for organization and structuring of information, namely identifying topical information vs. new via elision, word order, agreement, case, voice, and possessive markers. Selected methodology includes contrastive contextual analysis, attending to the information structure, in the general cognitive-functional framework. Based on the analysis of the corpus data and elicited tokens it is posited that Eastern Khanty displays strong correlation of reduced morphological complexity to increased pragmatic status of the discourse referents and makes consistent and robust use of possessive markers to manifest pragmatic identifiability/accessibility of the referents in the proposition.

Published online: 18 July 2012
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.126.05fil