Communicative variation of the typical existential syntactic structure in the Surgut dialect of Khanty

This paper considers the communicative variation in the Surgut dialect of Khanty, one of the indigenous languages of Siberia. A typical existential syntactic structure comprises three elements, to be referred to here as “subject,” “localizer,” and “predicate.” The prototypical meaning of this structure can be represented by simple existential sentences. The analysis covers 200 realizations of this structure sampled from a collection of texts representing different genres and idioms of the Surgut dialect. Four main variants of the structure are identified, taking into account both the constituent order and intonation structure. The realizations are grouped under the context in which they are used and their function in the text. These groups represent several distinct communicative situations in which the structure concerned is commonly used: discovering an object when observing a visible area, establishing the time, place, and main characters at the beginning of a text, switching attention to a new object, and others. These situations are grouped into three main situations determined by the position of the main focus on the subject, localizer, or predicate. Each main situation is associated with a specific communicative variant, in which the focal element is placed in such a way as to be emphasized intonationally. The realizations with pronominal adverbs in the localizer position are considered separately. It is in these cases that the focal subject causes two communicative variants that appear to be interchangeable, as no direct correlation between these communicative variants and the types of communicative situations has been found.