Paradigm of Actional Sentences in Khanty and Nenets

Abstract

Actional sentences describe certain ways in which the subjects affect the objects while the object's position in space does not change. The plane of content is the actional proposition, which contains the three necessary components, namely the subject, the object, and the predicate; the plane of expression is the model of the elementary simple sentence where the object position is prototypically expressed by a name in accusative. In the Khanty and Nenets languages, the actional elementary simple sentences tend to express the same types of relations but differ in their potential for paradigmatic variation. In Tundra Nenets, the communicative variants are related to variation in the choice of accusative, nominative, dative, or instrumental cases in order to express the thematic or rhematic objects and instruments/addressees. In the Kazym dialect of the Khanty language, the accusative form is only used in the system of pronominal declination; in the object position, nouns in nominative case are used. Therefore, to express the thematicrhematic articulation, verb categories of conjugation (opposition of subject and object conjugation types) are used, as well as genus, because the case system is contracted. In the Nenets language, the communicative paradigm is related to the variation in name categories, whereas in Khanty, it is related to variation in verb categories.