Historical, Morphological and Syntactic Patterns of Tundra Nenets Dual System

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.220131.149How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Dual System; Grammatical Number; Tundra Nenets; Samoyedic

Abstract

Tundra Nenets is one of a few Uralic languages retained the dual system. A broad range of previous studies on proto-languages, morphology, morphophonology, and syntax of Tundra Nenets are reviewed in this paper, for the purpose of shaping a comprehensive framework of dual number in Tundra Nenets. Both diachronic and synchronic characteristics of dual system are discussed in this paper, where morphological and syntactic patterns of dual number (e.g., nominal declension, verbal inflection, construction of pronouns and dual quantifier agreement) are thoroughly analysed. This paper yields several key findings as following. According to the analysis, the development of dual patterns in Proto-Uralic and Proto-Samoyedic serves as the fundamental factors for the dual system in modern Tundra Nenets. Besides, an analogous but uneven correspondence between dual and plural in terms of various inflections provides evidence for the role of dual as a derivative from plural. Additionally, “dual dilemma” summarised and proposed by this paper refers to the complications that emerge in the alternative syntactic expressions of dual number, revealing different outcomes in certain contexts. Moreover, despite the differences in orthography and diacritics among scholars, there is a relatively undoubted consensus over the real grammatical representations of dual forms in Tundra Nenets. Dialectal differences and pragmatic features of Tundra Nenets dual system await further research. These results shed light on the special status of dual number in Tundra Nenets with a long tradition and the significant function of dual for specifying meanings in morphological and syntactic aspects of this language.

Copyright

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Minsong He
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/02/01
TI  - Historical, Morphological and Syntactic Patterns of Tundra Nenets Dual System
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Education, Language and Art (ICELA 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 818
EP  - 827
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220131.149
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.220131.149
ID  - He2022
ER  -