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THE STRUCTURE OF NOUN PHRASES WITH REFERENTIAL PX.2P IN NORTHERN SAMOYEDIC // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2015. Issue 1 (7). P. 21-31

A characteristic feature of Northern Samoyedic is the referential, non-possessive use of second person possessive suffixes (further PX.2P) as a means of encoding topics. Although the importance of this feature for information structure is relatively well understood, the interaction of information structure with syntax has not received sufficient attention in prior research; the central aim of this study is to shed light on the structure of the noun phrase that hosts the referential PX. The investigation is a qualitative follow-up study of a prior investigation on the function and use of the PX.2P in the indigenous languages of the Taimyr Peninsula (Siegl in print). As the data of this study demonstrates, Northern Samoyedic languages display uniform structural behavior in their morphosyntactic realization of PX.2P marked noun phrases, in both verbal and non-verbal predication. Furthermore, topic marking in two languages of the same area, Dolgan and Taimyr Pidgin Russian, will be briefly examined too.

Keywords: Northern Samoyedic languages, Dolgan, Taimyr Pidgin Russian, definiteness, possessive suffixes, information structure, noun phrase