A rare type of benefactive construction

Evidence from Enets

Bibliographic Data

ID10292158
AuthorsOlesya Khanina (0000-0001-5930-4656, Russian Academy of Sciences), Andrey Shluinsky (0000-0002-2553-7213, Russian Academy of Sciences, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume52
Issue6
Pages1391-1431
Publication date2014-11-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLinguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0024-3949 • E-ISSN: 1613-396X
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/ling-2014-0025
OpenAlexW3135232952
LanguageEN
Citations received4

Together with other Northern Samoyedic languages, Enets shows a crosslinguistically unusual way of expressing benefactive semantics. The Enets benefactive construction consists of a specific “destinative” affix that marks the presence of a beneficiary in a given clause and of a possessive affix that marks the beneficiary itself. Both affixes are attached to one of the verb's arguments. This makes the beneficiary encoded as an adnominal dependent of the verb's argument. This paper has two goals. Firstly, a detailed description of the Enets benefactive construction is provided, including its morphology, morphosyntax, and peculiarities of the differential object marking. Secondly, we aim to establish crosslinguistic parallels with the Enets benefactive construction. While phenomena with similar semantic features have been attested in the world's languages, we show that the Enets construction demonstrates a unique set of semantic and morphosyntactic properties

Affix · Argument (complex analysis) · Beneficiary · Ergative case · Linguistics · Object (grammar) · Political science · Root (linguistics) · Verb · Computer Science · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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