Distribution of the Dual Number Markers of Nouns in Selkup (Corpus-Oriented Approach)

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the identification of the distribution of the dual number markers of nouns in an analytical and synthetic way in the southern, transitional, central and northern dialects and subdialects of Selkup. The material of the study is corpus data of more than 85,000 wordforms located on the digital platform “Lingvodoc” and in personal archives (Fieldworks Language Explorer files), as well as general grammatical and lexical papers on the language. It was revealed that the use of the basic Selkup suffix of the dual number -q(V) with nouns in Selkup dialects is distributed heterogeneously – the marker is not found in a number of materials, when it is attached directly to the stem (transitional subdialects, the southern part of the Narym dialect), however, it is used everywhere with animate nouns, denoting the complex of two homogeneous objects vie the suffixes of the mutual connection -sa- and the collective set mɨ-. In the southern part of the Narym dialect and in transitional subdialects new dualis formations are recorded in the form of the markers ‑štja or -štjaq(V). In the Vasyugan and northern materials cases of the doubled dualis with the suffixes of the mutual connection or the collective set are presented: -sa- / -mɨ- + -qV-q(V). It is necessary to separate the more northern and southern parts of the Narym dialect, where in the first case, the suffix of the dualis -q(V) appears, and in the second, innovations in the forms of the dualis like -štja and -štjaq(V) are noted. In all Selkup materials the main or one of the main strategies for marking the duality of nouns is an analytical strategy, which consist in the use of the numeral sitte ‘two’ and the noun in the singular (in some cases in the plural).