Negation in Eastern Khanty and Southern Selkup
The paper reviews the morphosyntactic, prosodic, semantic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic features of negation in two endangered indigenous Uralic languages of Western Siberia: Eastern Khanty and Southern Selkup. These languages have remote genetic affiliation falling respectively within the Finno-Ugric and the Samoyedic branches of the Uralic language family. At the same time they are characterized by the extended cultural and linguistic contact in the area of the middle Ob river in Tomsk region. Based on the available corpus the data is analyzed in the general typological context, with a prospect for local areal Siberian and genetic Uralic perspective. From the typological standpoint Eastern Khanty and Southern Selkup syntactic negation strategies demonstrate consistent overall symmetry in accordance with the dominant SOV word order tendencies. However, there are special cases of asymmetric strategies associated with existential negation and negation with indefinite / negative proforms.