Syntax and semantics of the Selkup noun phrase

Abstract

The paper at hand aims at describing the basic patterns of syntax and semantics of noun phrases in Selkup; all four dialect groups of Selkup (Northern, Central, Southern and Ket) are taken into account for the description of NPs but it can be shown that they do not differ regarding the structure of noun phrases. The approach is corpus based, the data in use stems from two corpora: INEL Selkup corpus (Brykina et al. 2020) and the SLE corpus (Budzisch et al. 2019), together they consist of 404 texts with 16,741 sentences and 94,553 tokens. Noun phrases can be bare or modified in Selkup; in the latter case no agreement of modifier and head noun is observed in any case. The modifiers occurring in Selkup are adjectives, numerals and quantifiers, demonstratives, possessors as well as participles forming relative clauses. Generally, it can be said that noun phrases in Selkup are structured as expected in an articless SOV language, namely exhibiting no agreement and being head-final. There is one seeming exception, namely the universal quantifiers muntɨk ‘all; whole’ and wes’ ‘all; whole’, which can be placed after the noun they modify.