Пассивный залог как один из компонентов выражения информационной структуры в мансийском языке: данные верхнелозьвинского диалекта

Abstract

This article is aimed at investigating the passive voice as one of the means of marking information structure. The data we use come from our own fieldwork among the Upper Lozva Mansi in 2017—2019 conducted in villages of Ushma and Treskolje of the Ivdel district of the Sverdlovsk oblast, Russian Federation. The data gathered during field trips was assembled into a small corpus of the Northern Mansi language, and we extracted all examples of passive voice found in this corpus. In the article, we briefly summarize the views of our predecessors on the role of the passive voice in Ob-Ugric languages and afterwards we describe the general outline of information structure in Mansi by briefly depicting the use of subject and object conjugations, the passive voice and case marking. We separately analyze the passive voice constructions formed from intransitive, transitive and bitransitive verbs. We conclude that passive voice is, as stated in previous studies, used for promoting the most topical constituent to the subject position. However, we also suppose that there are some other factors that contribute to the choice of voice in Mansi, e. g. animacy and referential properties of the constituent in question. We describe cases in which the most animate or the most definite (and not the most topical) constituent is being promoted to the subject position. We also suppose that not only these factors may separately affect the choice of voice, but also that the sum of these parameters might be crucial. We suggest that it is necessary to create a formal model which would include all the above-mentioned parameters and adequately describe the choice of voice in Mansi and in Ob-Ugric.