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LANDMARK SEMANTICS AND THE USE OF SPATIAL EXPRESSIONS IN FOREST ENETS // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2018. Issue 2 (20). P. 39-50

The paper examines the division of labour between spatial cases and serial postpositions referring to the interior and top parts of the landmark in Forest Enets (Samoyedic, Uralic). The study is based on the corpus of modern and archive texts in Forest Enets. The focus is on the interaction between landmark semantics and the semantics of case or postposition. The study shows that case is the major means of marking for the nouns denoting landmarks that lack distinct spatial contours, including toponyms and object-part terms. Postpositional marking is more frequent for landmarks with well-defined spatial configuration, e.g. interior region for the postpositions of the IN-series or vertical axis for the postpositions of the SUPER-series. The spatial configuration of the landmark can be additionally profiled by the semantics of the verb. Thus, contrary to the idea proposed in a number of studies, these results suggest that in natural texts postpositional marking is not primarily associated with the non-standard function of the landmark or an unexpected spatial scenario. More generally, from the grammaticalization theory perspective, it is reasonable to expect that postpositions will more readily replace case markers in the contexts where postpositional semantics is more compatible with the semantics of landmark and the verb, rather than in less natural contexts.

Keywords: Enets, spatial cases, adpositions, postpositions, landmark, spatial configuration, grammaticalization