Mus N. Interrogative words and content questions in Tundra Nenets

Szeged, 2015. — 202 p.
A PhD dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Szeged
Supervisor: Beáta Wagner-Nagy, Prof. Dr.The aim of this study is to provide a description of Tundra Nenets content questions. The dissertation is organized as follows. Chapter 2 provides a description of the demography and ethnography of Tundra Nenets, as well as, of its writing system, transcription, glossing conventions. Furthermore, the chapter gives a general overview of the syntactic and morphosyntactic features of Tundra Nenets that are relevant for the present study. Finally, Chapter 2 reviews the literature on (Tundra) Nenets and Samoyedic languages in general. Chapter 3 concentrates on the primary data and the corpus. In addition, certain considerations and data collection strategies are discussed. Chapter 4 is an overview of the general literature on interrogatives from a typological point of view. The analysed constructions are introduced, and several research questions are formulated. At the same time, the chapter excludes those constructions which do not have relevancy of the study: polar and alternative interrogatives, echo questions, relative and indefinite pro-forms, compound clauses, negated clauses, multiple interrogatives, interrogative mood marker and interrogative verb. As the study is based on written sources, interrogative intonation cannot be examined either. Chapter 5 provides the lexico-semantic categorization of Tundra Nenets interrogative words. Chapter 6 discusses the grammatical properties of Tundra Nenets interrogative words. Chapter 7 examines the syntactic position of interrogative phrases in intransitive, transitive and nonverbal questions. Chapter 8 sums up the findings of this thesis.