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Article published In: Areal Effects on Argument-Coding Patterns
Edited by Daria Alfimova, Kirill Kozhanov and Sergey Say
[Studies in Language 49:4] 2025
► pp. 922–957

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Spreading of valency patterns across dialects

The case of Evenki

ORCiD logo with link | University of Hamburg
Published online: 14 January 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.23059.sto
Abstract
The paper deals with variation in argument encoding attested in Evenki dialects. Evenki (Tungusic) is spoken in a large area throughout Siberia and manifests a high dialectal diversity. I consider 9 verbs with variable argument encoding strategies across 15 Evenki dialects. The main data on 6 dialects were obtained from two corpora of Evenki, supplementary data come from grammatical descriptions. The cluster analysis of variation in argument encoding shows the following results. Clusters of dialects based on valency patterns do not match the existing classification of Evenki dialects. At the same time, they correlate much better with the areal distribution of the dialects and with the presence/absence of contact with other languages. This supports the claim that valency patterns are diachronically unstable and tend to be easily borrowed.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • (1)Change in argument encoding as a language-inherent process
    • (2)Change in argument encoding as a contact-induced process
  • 2.Evenki: Preliminary information
    • 2.1Evenki and its dialects
    • 2.2Evenki case system
  • 3.Data on argument encoding in Evenki dialects
  • 4.Variable argument encoding in Evenki: Data selection
  • 5.Cluster analysis of variation in argument encoding
  • 6.Results: Argument encoding correlates with areal distribution and contact settings rather than with dialectal classification
  • 7.More evidence from grammatical descriptions
  • 8.Conclusion and discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
References (56)
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