Development of the ablative formant *naːnɨ in Selkup dialects

Development of the ablative formant *naːnɨ in Selkup dialects

Kovylin S.V. (ISP RAS, Moscow, Russia; TSPU, Tomsk, Russia)

Abstract

This paper describes the development of the ablative formant *naːnɨ in the southern, transitional, central and northern Selkup dialects. The introduction of a large volume of new corpus and archival data, considering previously published materials, made it possible to conduct a detailed analysis across the maximum number of dialects. Markers that emerged from *naːnɨ form two isolated areas: northern and southern-transitional-central. In the southern, transitional, and central dialects, the postposition *naːnɨ transformed into suffixed forms and is used with animate nouns. In the Ket dialect, the form -nannɨ remained, while in the others there was a reduction of -naːnɨ ˃ -nan, a coincidence of the reduced form with the locative case -nan and the formation of a new syncretic locative-ablative formant -nan. Innovative forms ending in  nanto/-nant(V), -nandɨk and -nandɨkto are also found in dialects, where additional ablative suffixes are added to the locative-ablative formant to overcome case syncretism. The main semantic roles of nouns marked with these suffixes are Source, Object of Comparison, Cause, Object against which actions are taken, Part-Whole and Material. Northern dialects retained the postposition, where it serves as a universal ablative marker, with its subsequent transformation: naːnɨ ˃ nɔːnɨ by the 20th century. The postposition is used to encode such semantic roles as Source of Place and Time, Material, Cause, Object of Comparison, Part-Whole and Stimulus.

Keywords

ablative markers; areal linguistics; Selkup dialects; semantic roles.

Edition

Proceedings of the Institute for System Programming, vol. 38, issue 6, part 2, 2026, pp. 303-316

ISSN 2220-6426 (Online), ISSN 2079-8156 (Print).

DOI: 10.15514/ISPRAS-2026-38(6)-39

For citation

Kovylin S.V. Development of the ablative formant *naːnɨ in Selkup dialects. Proceedings of the Institute for System Programming, vol. 38, issue 6, part 2, 2026, pp. 303-316 DOI: 10.15514/ISPRAS-2026-38(6)-39.

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