Recent Contact-Induced Morphosyntactic Changes in the Lower Kolyma Region

Abstract

The paper deals with recent contact-induced changes in the grammar of two languages of the Lower Kolyma tundra, Tundra Yukaghir (TY) and Lower Kolyma Even (LKE). The morphosyntax of these languages has undergone a rather strong influence from Sakha in the course of the 20th century. The investigation focusses on the structural copying of Sakha patterns into TY and LKE, which resulted in the emergence of several new categories, in particular, the future imperative, the necessitive based on the future participle with or without proprietive marking, evaluative morphology, and contrastive markers deriving from the converbs of the copula verb. In addition, the TY system of differential object marking has changed under the influence of Sakha. These phenomena are interpreted against their historical and sociolinguistic settings, specifically, the types of multilingual situations in the region. The ramifications of the findings for the theory of language contact are also discussed.