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Article In: Journal of Uralic Linguistics: Online-First Articles

On morphosyntactic properties of Uralic relational nouns

ORCiD logo with link | University of Helsinki, Finland | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany
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Abstract
There is a category of “postpositions” in most, if not all, Uralic languages that consists of two types of words: words that take spatial case inflection, and words that do not. These groups also have other morphosyntactic and semantic differences, which suggests that there are actually two distinct word classes instead of one. In this paper, I analyse the morphosyntactic properties of the inflecting “postpositions” that I call relational nouns (RN) and establish a functional prototype of RNs that can be used to distinguish this word class also in other Uralic languages. Regarding the theoretical approach, the study is based on typological research on word classes, which means that the class of RNs is defined based on both semantics and morphosyntax, and the category is seen as having a prototype structure. The aim of this study is to provide a typologically informed description of a newly introduced word class in the Uralic languages.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Relational nouns from a typological perspective
    • 1.2The language sample
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1The semantics of relational nouns
    • 2.2Word classes and their properties
    • 2.3Relational nouns in Uralic languages
  • 3.Properties of relational nouns in Uralic languages
    • 3.1Inflection of relational nouns in Uralic languages
    • 3.2Locus of possessive marking in the relational noun phrase
    • 3.3Locus of number marking in the relational noun phrase
    • 3.4Possibility of inflecting relational nouns in grammatical cases
    • 3.5Case marking of a nominal dependent in the relational noun phrase
    • 3.6Case marking of a pronominal dependent in the relational noun phrase
    • 3.7The ability of a relational noun to form compounds and to function as an adnominal dependent
  • 4.Relational nouns as a category in Uralic languages
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • Author queries
  • References
References (50)
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