Plural Number Markers of Nouns in Selkup Dialects
https://doi.org/10.15514/ISPRAS-2025-37(6)-11
Abstract
The paper is devoted to the study of plural forms of nouns in the southern, transitional, central and northern dialects of Selkup. The material comprises corpus data of more than 85,000 tokens located on the Lingvodoc platform and in personal archives (Fieldworks Language Explorer files), as well as general grammatical and lexical papers on the language. The plural of nouns can be expressed by the suffixes -t(V), -la, -i (-ni), by the contaminated marker -lat, plural suffixes in combination with the markers of mutual connection ‑sa- and the collective plurality -mɨ- – -sat, -sala, -mɨt, mɨtla, as well as by the suffix of mutual connection -mɨ- without additional markers of plurality. As a result of the research, it was found out that the main plural suffix in the southern and transitional language zones is -la, in the central Vasyugan and Tym, as well as in the northern dialects – -t(V). In the central Narym dialect, both markers -t(V) and -la are found, including the contaminated form -lat, where the suffix -t(V) is more characteristic for the northern part, and -la for the southern part. In northern and central dialects, the plural marker -i (-ni) is used in possessive forms, while in southern and transitional dialects it was replaced by the marker -la in the same positions. In southern, transitional, central and northern dialects, with kinship terms, the suffix -sa- together with -t(V) – sat is used; more rarely, in southern, central, and northern dialects the collective suffix is -mɨ- together with -t(V) – -mɨt is observed. In northern dialects, the marker ‑mɨ- is used to express collective plurality without additional suffixes of numbers.
Supporting agencies: This paper was supported by the grant RNF № 25-78-20002 “Capabilities of Artificial Intelligence for Comparative-Historical Study of Low-Resource Languages of the Peoples of the Russian Federation”.
About the Author
Sergei Vasilievich KOVYLIN
Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
Tomsk State Pedagogical University
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Cand. Sci. (Philol.), Senior research fellow of the laboratory “Linguistic platforms” of the Institute for System Programming of the RAS since 2019; Associate professor of the Department of Indigenous Siberian Languages at Tomsk State Pedagogical University since 2019. Research interests: corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, documentation and the revitalization of endangered languages and cultures.
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Review
For citations:
KOVYLIN S.V. Plural Number Markers of Nouns in Selkup Dialects. Proceedings of the Institute for System Programming of the RAS (Proceedings of ISP RAS). 2025;37(6):181-192. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.15514/ISPRAS-2025-37(6)-11
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