DISTRIBUTION OF COMPLEMENTIZERS IN THE URMI VARIETIES OF URMIYA
DOI: 10.23951/2307-6119-2022-2-22-33
The aim of the paper is to analyze the complementizer distribution in Urmi, a North Eastern Neo-Aramaic variety, as spoken nowadays in the village of Urmiya, Krasnodar Krai (Russia). The families of Urmi speakers mostly come from Iran, Armenia and Georgia, so the system of complement-marking in their varieties is compared to the patterns of the respective regional Urmi varieties, reported in the literature. The Urmi varieties in Urmiya display a variation in complementizer marking that is not directly accounted for by the initial dialectal division. Urmiya varieties also display some innovations. For instance, semantic contrasts in complements of perception verbs can be expressed by interrogative manner words: this pattern, even though typologically expectable, has so far been unattested in Urmi. The distribution of complementizers in the subjunctive has a functional basis, at least in elicited data: different-subject constructions tend to be more frequently introduced by a complementizer than same-subject constructions. I show that several of the innovations can be accounted for, or at least favoured by contact influence. The contact influence of Russian on complementation manifests as instances of both matter- and pattern-borrowing, but does not go deeper than complementizer marking and, probably, word order permutations. Thus, the distribution of complementizers in the Urmi of Urmiya is different from the distributions reported in the literature for Urmi of other regions, which reflects the fact that complement-marking is more prone to contact influence and innovations than deeper layers of syntax and morphology.
Keywords: complementation, complementizer, language contact, functional typology, pattern-borrowing, grammaticalization, North Eastern Neo-Aramaic, Urmi
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Issue: 2, 2022
Series of issue: Issue 2
Rubric: LINGUISTICS
Pages: 22 — 33
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