Journal of Uralic Linguistics - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2022

This article introduces the Journal of Uralic Linguistics, outlining its motivations, aims and scope. It also provides a brief overview of the contents of the inaugural issue, which contains four research papers by leading scholars in the field.

This paper presents the Uralic Areal Typology Online (UraTyp 1.0), a typological dataset of 35 Uralic languages and a total of 360 features, mainly covering the levels of morphology, syntax, and phonology. The features belong to two different datasets: 195 features’ definitions originate from the Grambank (GB) database, developed for comparison of world language typology, whereas 165 features (UT) have been designed specifically to describe the typological variation within the Uralic language family. We present a series of analyses of the dataset demonstrating its scope and possibilities. The complete data set correctly identifies the main Uralic subgroups in a Principal Components Analysis, whereas GB data alone is insufficiently granular to detect this family-internal structure. Similar analyses limited to various typological subdomains also give variable results. A model-based admixture analysis identifies four distinct areas of historical interaction: Saami, Finnic, the Volga area and Ob-Ugric.

Starting from a morphosyntactic puzzle of the Ugric and Samoyedic languages of the Uralic family (possessive agreement suffixes functioning as accusative allomorphs on pronominal objects), this paper identifies a pronoun cycle which leads from reflexives via intensifiers and via referentially independent intensive pronouns to neutral pronouns. In Tundra Nenets, evidence of three rounds of reflexive renewal is also pointed out, with the three sets of pronouns frozen at different stages of the cycle. The analysis has implications for debated issues of language change. It is shown that elements participating in cyclic changes not only suffer feature loss but also incorporate features. Based on the recurring cycle in Tundra Nenets, it is argued that the cyclicity of linguistic changes implies a notion of unidirectionality that also leaves room for unpredictable outcomes.

Evidentiality conveys information about the nature – and reliability – of the information source. This paper investigates the Finnish reportative evidential (hearsay particle) kuulemma and the dubitative particle muka (‘supposedly, allegedly, as if’). I propose a unifying analysis of two seemingly divergent uses of muka, and show how they contrast with kuulemma. My analysis builds on and extends recent work on reportatives regarding the distinction between the Animator (the speaker who utters the sentence) and the Principal (the person whose commitments are being expressed). Furthermore, I suggest that the dubitative muka may point to the existence of non-assertive discourse moves and has implications for our understanding of the discourse role of ‘Principal.’ This work also informs typological work on evidentials and related expressions by providing a systematic investigation of reportative and dubitative markers in a non-Indo-European language.

This paper contributes another round in the debate over how to analyze object agreement in Hungarian, a form of differential object marking that is found among other Uralic languages as well. I have previously argued that the choice of conjugation is determined not by the syntactic category of the object, but rather on the basis of semantic factors, primarily: on the Lexical Familiarity Hypothesis (LFH), selected lexical items are assigned a definiteness feature in virtue of a certain type of familiarity presupposition that they carry. Subsequent work has raised challenges for the LFH. This paper considers what would be necessary in order for these challenges to be met. I conclude that the LFH can be defended, if supplemented by a certain set of independently-motivated assumptions. In fact, this theory enjoys certain advantages over the most recent alternative.