EAP - Linguistica Uralica Publications

PUBLISHED
SINCE 1965

Linguistica Uralica

ISSN 1736-7506 (Electronic)
ISSN 0868-4731 (Print)

Open Access Journal

CiteScore: 0.5

Unmarked Object in the Uralic Languages. A Diachronic Typological Approach; pp. 1-33

PDF | doi:10.3176/lu.2008.1.01

Author

Ferenc Havas

Abstract

The conventional wisdom is that unmarked object existed in Proto-Uralic. Of the syntactic enviroments I would only exclude the occurrence of unmarked object next to ”passive” verbs from those that may have been inherited from the proto-language. For the remaining six environments inheritance from the proto-language is at least a possible alternative, in some cases the only one. Thus the efforts to derive unmarked object from the reanalysis of some other syntactic function of the nominative form are unjustified. The synchronic coexistence of the syntactic structures found in the world’s languages is the depositary of a historical relation in a diachronic-typological sense, which can be interpreted in terms of a schematogony. In these terms, the most recent syntactic structure is the nominative pattern with subject and object as the typical categories. Subject typifies the nominative pattern, but object is found already in triadic languages and is thus a prenominative category in itself. More clearly prenominative is its unmarked variant, whose origins go back to the proto-transitive and proto-active stages, where the category of object had not yet emerged. Consequently, unmarked object must be a prenominative inheritance in Uralic, one of those relics that make it possible to trace the prehistory of our languages in a diachronic-typological sense back into periods that are - justifiably - excluded from the scope of traditional comparative and historical research.

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