ThEA - Theoretical and experimental approaches to dialectal variation and contact-induced change: a case study of Tundra Nenets
Project overview
The study of syntactic changes in Siberian indigenous languages remains largely unexplored and may provide new insights into the structural shift from Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) to Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order, shedding light on the role of language contact in driving syntactic restructuring.
The Tundra Nenets language — an endangered indigenous language of northwestern Siberia belonging to the Samoyedic branch of the Uralic language family — serves as a compelling case study in this regard. While it remains fundamentally a verb-final language, non-verb-final clauses have been attested, influenced by discourse-pragmatic factors. However, despite well-documented phonological and morphological differences, systematic research on dialectal syntactic variation remains lacking.
This project originally aimed to examine Russian-induced syntactic changes in Tundra Nenets by comparing dialects spoken in the Yamalo-Nenets Okrug and the Taymyr Autonomous Okrug (see the map below). The study employed a combined approach of theoretical and experimental syntax.
The project sought to address three key questions:
- Are there contact-induced syntactic changes across dialects?
- Do different sociolinguistic environments result in distinct patterns of change?
- Can Tundra Nenets provide insights into broader typological patterns of contact-induced change?
To test our general hypothesis, we put the focus on a specific clause type: interrogatives, as they provide a valuable basis for examining contact-induced language change. As Greenberg (1966) observed, certain interrogative strategies correlate, at least to some extent, with the basic word order of a language. Moreover, beyond possible syntactic variation, the prosody of interrogative sentences may also play a crucial role in shaping linguistic change.
Revised Objectives
The ThEA project began in 2018. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian-Ukrainian war, fieldwork and direct data collection became unfeasible. As a result, we shifted our research focus toward a comparative investigation, incorporating additional indigenous languages spoken in neighboring regions of Tundra Nenets. This adjustment allows us to analyse contact-induced changes using corpus data, broadening the scope of the study while maintaining its core objectives.
In addition to expanding our comparative investigation to include additional indigenous Siberian languages, we have placed a strong emphasis on the computational processing of Tundra Nenets data. This process encompasses data organisation, digital processing, and comprehensive linguistic annotation at the morphological, syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic levels, followed by systematic analysis. This aspect of the project is carried out in collaboration with the Modyco Lab at Nanterre University, the INRIA Lab at Nancy University, the Department of Computer Engineering at Boğaziçi University, and the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics at Charles University in Prague. By improving the accessibility and structural organisation of the data, we aim to support more in-depth investigations into the Nenets languages and their linguistic characteristics. For a more detailed description, visit the Tundra Nenets linguistic data sets section of this homepage.
The project is funded by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH) of Hungary under Grant ID FK 129235, with a projected completion date of March 2025.