Major and Minor Uralic Languages: Intersections and Mutual Impulses

Principal investigator (Hungary): Éva Dékány
Principal investigator (Estonia): Gerson Klumpp (University of Tartu)

The project focuses on cross-linguistic comparisons between small Uralic languages on the one hand and Estonian and Hungarian on the other, in the domain of minor grammatical categories. Minor categories are worth investigating for two reasons. 1) In small Uralic languages, they are consistently under-documented and poorly understood. The project will yield new empirical and theoretical results relating to discourse particles, discourse-pragmatic roles, evidentiality and the expression of epistemicity, thus contributing to language documentation as well as typological, comparative and theoretical linguistics. The findings from the smaller languages will be connected to and compared with the well-described grammars of Estonian/Hungarian, allowing an improved understanding of both major and minor Uralic languages. 2) Minor categories which are well-described often pose particular challenges to grammatical theory. In this regard the project investigates the partitive case, improving on earlier approaches that could not fully account for its wide distribution. The findings from the Estonian/Finnish partitive will shed new light on differential object marking in the smaller Uralic languages.