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The present paper examines the distribution of referentially independent genitive and unmarked subjects and subject-oriented person-number inflections in non-finite clauses in Meadow Mari (Uralic), focusing on participles, event nominals, and temporal gerunds. Empirically, the study addresses existing gaps in the description of these phenomena, uncovering more general patterns as well as several microparameters. It also reveals a striking similarity between event nominals and temporal gerunds. Theoretically, the paper contributes to a better understanding of these constructions in the following ways. First, it proposes an analysis of temporal gerunds as event nominals embedded in postpositional phrases. Second, it outlines an approach to licensing overt subjects and inflections in participial clauses and event nominals. Third, building upon Dékány & Georgieva's (2020) work on Udmurt, it explores ways to unify the treatment of event nominals and participial modifiers in Mari, which share morphology; a covert N account is shown to be the most promising one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to answer why the Uralic languages use, or used until intensive contacts with Indo-European languages, only non-finite subordination. It argues against regarding the evolution of finite subordination language development, showing that languages with non-finite subordination and parataxis have the same expressive power as languages with finite subordination. It claims that non-finite subordination is a concomitant of SOV word order, and the growing proportion of finite subordination in the Uralic languages from east to west, and in the history of Hungarian is a consequence of the loosening of the SOV order and the emergence of SVO. The paper examines two hypotheses about the correlations between SOV and non-finite subordination, and SVO and finite subordination, the Final-Over-Final Condition of Biberauer, Holmberg & Roberts (2014, etc.), a formal principle constraining clausal architecture, and the Minimize Domains Principle of Hawkins (2004, etc.), a functional principle of processing efficiency. The two theories make largely overlapping correct predictions for the Uralic languages, which suggests that the Final-Over-Final Condition may be the syntacticization of the condition that ensures processing efficiency in SOV and SVO languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes digital resources available for Enets, an endangered Northern Samoyedic language: a multimedia dictionary and a digital corpus, both created by the author with her collaborators. Possible uses of these resources for linguistic research are discussed with the help of several examples. The dictionary is shown to seize limits of phonetic variation involving a mixture of two vowel phonemes, and the corpus is shown to provide a better description to grammatical structures involving ditransitive semantics. All examples illustrate the added value of the digital resources’ use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the digital vitality of Uralic languages and dialects, and discuss how existing approaches to language revitalization relate to this model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]