Севернохантыйский как язык с чертами аккузативного и иерархического кодирования

Abstract

This study features an alignment system in Kazym Khanty. Several facts including accusative marking of personal pronouns, verbal agreement with S/A and a strong tendency towards the clause-initial position of S/A suggest treating Kazym Khanty alignment as accusative. Meanwhile field and text data on the distribution of the active and passive voice as well as subject and subject-object agreement forms reveal several hierarchical coding effects. These include sensitivity of active/passive distinction to animacy and referentiality of the core participants and definiteness requirement of both participants for subject-object agreement. In sum, these facts suggest that Kazym Khanty can be considered an intermediate case of an alignment system combining certain surface properties of an accusative alignment with underlying hierarchical distribution patterns resembling some hierarchical coding systems of Algonquian and TibetoBurman languages.