Part of
Negation in Uralic LanguagesEdited by Matti Miestamo, Anne Tamm and Beáta Wagner-Nagy
[Typological Studies in Language 108] 2015
► pp. 615–632
Edited by Matti Miestamo, Anne Tamm and Beáta Wagner-Nagy
[Typological Studies in Language 108] 2015
► pp. 615–632
Negation in Eastern Khanty narratives from the perspective of information flow
In this article, I examine the functions of the subject and the object of negative sentences with the negative particles əntə and əntəm in Khanty discourse from the perspective of information structure and flow. Some differences between affirmative and negative clauses are found in the analysis. By comparing negatives with affirmatives, I also argue that negatives introduce only given information, which has been suggested by a previous typological study (Givón 1984). The theoretical framework used in this study is discourse-based functionalism (e.g. Du Bois 1987; Givón 1984). The data employed comprises narrative texts recorded during fieldwork from the end of the 1980s (Csepregi 1998).
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