Irina Nikolaeva

A grammar of Tundra Nenets

The book is the first substantial description of Tundra Nenets, a Uralic language spoken in Western Siberia and the north of European Russia. It provides a lasting piece of documentation of this highly endangered language. For a language as little researched as Nenets, any aspect of grammar may prove to be of potential significance for the field of linguistics and turn out to be theoretically challenging.

Optimal syllables are not always optimal : A prosodic structure of Yukaghir

The object of this paper is to investigate the prosodic system of Yukaghir from the perspective of Optimality Theory. The analysis reveals that the prosodic word in Yukaghir exhibits continuous left-to-right parsing into bimoraic monosyllabic feet. As a result, the surface occurrence of light monomoraic syllables is prohibited, and various strategies apply to fix the output. From a general point of view this article aims to show that a grammar may include a requirement for a foot to be aligned with both edges of the same syllable. When the constraints on foot structure play a critical role in determining the surface shape of the word, this requirement forces input-unfaithful heavy closed syllables.

A grammar of Kolyma Yukaghir

Abstract Elena Maslova, A Grammar of Kolyma Yukaghir. (Mouton Grammar Library, 27.) Berlin:Mouton de Gruyter, 2003, xviii + 609 pages, ISBN 3-11-017527-4, EUR 148. 1. General Kolyma Yukaghir and Tundra Yukaghir are closely related languages spoken in the north-eastern part of Russia. Kolyma Yukaghir at present has about 40 speakers. The language is not entirely undescribed: Jochelson (1905) and especially Krejnovič (1979, 1982) are useful accounts of morphology and give basic phonological and syntactic information, while Nyikolajeva (2000) is a short overview of Yukaghir grammar in historical perspective. There are a number of articles by various authors focusing on particular grammatical points. Several folklore text collections have been published (Jochelson 1898, 1900; Nikolaeva (ed.) 1989, 1997; Maslova 2002). These works provide essential facts about the language. However, most of them are written in Russian or Hungarian and use terminology and representational conventions that do not always correspond to modern scholarly practice, with examples presented less than transparently, often lacking morpheme-by-morpheme glossing. Most importantly, previous descriptions have many gaps by modern standards and for the most part ignore syntax. Described incompletely, idiosyncratically, and somewhat inaccessibly, Yukaghir grammar has played little or no role in considerations of modern theoretical linguists and typologists.