Olesya Khanina

• PhD
• Senior Researcher at University of Helsinki

This paper presents the design rationale and pilot demonstration of the GramAdapt Social Contact questionnaire; a research tool developed for collecting global comparative sociolinguistic data on language contact scenarios. The questionnaire is qualitative with quantitative potential, inviting language community experts to provide best-assessment a...

Tämä juhlakirja koostuu neljästäkymmenestäkolmesta professori Riho Grünthalin (s. 22.5.1964) 60-vuotispäiväksi kirjoitetusta lahjasta. Opiskelu- ja työtoverit sekä oppilaat tarkastelevat artikkeleissaan uralilaisen kielikunnan eri haaroja sekä kielten ja puhujayhteisöjen esihistoriaa. Kirjoituksissa käsitellään Grünthalille läheisiä aiheita. Tutkit...

Tämä juhlakirja koostuu neljästäkymmenestäkolmesta professori Riho Grünthalin (s. 22.5.1964) 60-vuotispäiväksi kirjoitetusta lahjasta. Opiskelu- ja työtoverit sekä oppilaat tarkastelevat artikkeleissaan uralilaisen kielikunnan eri haaroja sekä kielten ja puhujayhteisöjen esihistoriaa. Kirjoituksissa käsitellään Grünthalille läheisiä aiheita. Tutkit...

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Eugene Helimski — an eminent linguist, specialist in Uralic, Tungusic, Turkic and Slavic descriptive and comparative linguistics. He was author of several dictionaries, did a great amount of work concerning the history of Uralic languages, published many old archival records, spent much time in the field, c...

The widespread Uralic family offers several advantages for tracing prehistory: a firm absolute chronological anchor point in an ancient contact episode with well-dated Indo-Iranian; other points of intersection or diagnostic non-intersection with early Indo-European (the Late Proto-Indo-European-speaking Yamnaya culture of the western steppe, the A...

Besprechung Güldemann, Tom & McConvell, Patrick & Rhodes, Richard A. (eds.). 2020. The language of hunter-gatherers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xxii + 720 pp.

Aims and objectives This paper reconstructs past multilingualism (1900–1930s) among the nomadic people of the Lower Yenisei in northern Siberia, with particular attention to the language ideologies behind it; it is validated by parallels from small-scale communities worldwide. Approach An ethnographic approach is taken, which interprets sociolingu...

Aims The paper aims at providing an exhaustive overview of studies of small-scale multilingualism, a type of language ecology typical of—but not exclusive to—indigenous communities with small numbers of speakers. We identify the similarities and differences among situations of such multilingualism, which lay the foundations for a future typology of...

The former Soviet Union (USSR) provides the ideal territory for studying language contact between one and the same dominant language (Russian) and a wide range of genealogically and typologically diverse languages with varying histories of language contact. This is the first book that bundles different case studies and systematically investigates t...

This paper reports on a corpus study of two ditransitive constructions in Enets (Uralic, Samoyedic): the standard ditransitive construction and the so-called Destinative construction involving a specific destinative nominal morpheme. We suggest that the mutual distribution of the two competing constructions depends on referential properties of them...

This paper contributes to the typology of “active-stative” split intransitivity and middle voice with a detailed case study: it proceeds from a typological comparison of the two phenomena, which are usually treated apart, to an analysis of the Enets data and a discussion of its place in the typology of possible intransitive splits. Enets (Uralic, S...

A collection of traditional and ‘old life’ stories recorded in the late 1940s is used to reconstruct the sociolinguistic situation of the Enets community in Northern Siberia from the 1850s until the 1930s. The Enets had regular contacts with a number of neighbouring indigenous peoples (Nganasans, Tundra Nenets, Selkups, Evenkis, Dolgans) and later...

The paper discusses digital resources now existing for Enets (a corpus and sound dictionaries) and illustrates new descriptive possibilities entailed by their usage. Two examples from the Enets phonology, known for its extreme variability, and one example from the Enets grammar are used for the purpose. Firstly, a distributional analysis of front v...

The paper gives a thorough description of conjunctive coordination in Enets (Forest and Tundra dialects) based on a corpus of natural texts: we discuss both indigeneous Uralic strategies and those using words borrowed from Russian. Syntactic properties (possible coordinands, verbal cross-reference of coordinated subjects and objects) and semantic d...

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 at...

Across North Asia, complex sentence formation patterns display an unusually high prevalence of suffixed relational morphemes used to convey subordination. Suffixal subordinators occur in a variety of genetic groupings, most notably Samoyedic, Turkic, and Tungusic, but also in some of the region’s language isolates, such as Ket and Ainu. No general...

The paper reports on a cross-linguistic survey of translational equivalents of the Standard Average European concept of wanting. It is conducted on a variety sample of 73 languages, each of which was checked for morphosyntactic and semantic properties of its regular means for expressing wanting, i.e. desideratives. Desideratives are shown to typica...

Semantic alignment refers to a type of language that has two means of morphosyntactically encoding the arguments of intransitive predicates, typically treating these as an agent or as a patient of a transitive predicate, or else by a means of a treatment that varies according to lexical aspect. This book presents a collection of new typological exa...