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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 article discusses the emergence of the partitive case in the three western-most branches of the Uralic language family, which are Saamic and Finnic in North Europe, and Mordvinic in Central Russia. The Finnic languages represent the outer edge of development in the partitive from an earlier ablative case, which used to manifest 'source', a specific property of spatial relations. In Finnic the partitive case is a multifunctional and conceptually distinct case, an inflectional category which has developed highly specific functions in object marking, negative phrase and as a case of non-canonical subject. Traces of this development are found in Saamic and Mordvinic as well, whereas other Uralic languages don't share this kind of secondary development and functional extension. The development of this particular affix consists of several stages, special bottlenecks, enhancing functional properties and triggering the reanalysis of an inherited affix *-ta/-tä. This article focuses on the diachrony of this particular affix with special emphasis on western Uralic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Amele language of Papua New Guinea is one of many Trans-New Guinea languages spoken in Papua New Guinea. Amele has a negator 'qee' ('q' represents a voiced dorso-labiovelar plosive), which follows the element negated. Yet, while having verb conjugations for persons and numbers, Amele has no negative conjugation in the present tense. Typologically, some other languages, for example, Finnish, also exhibit negative conjugations of verbs, but these behaviors of the negations differ in interesting ways. This contrastive study investigates the negation of grammars in Amele (Papua New Guinea) and Finnish (Finland, Uralic), by comparing negative particles and negative verb conjugations in both of these languages, while clarifying their morphological behaviors. As such, the study describes Amele's and Finnish's positive-negative and present/past distinctions through their verbal morphologies and through their functional markedness in past tenses, ultimately observing these functional points in the languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During their migration from the Eastern European steppes to the Tarim Basin, the ancestors of the Tocharians must have come into contact with speakers of different languages, which may have influenced the early Tocharian language. Early Uralic has been identified as possibly having been the source of such influence, especially in the domain of phonology and nominal morphology. In a 2019 article, Michaël Peyrot focused specifically on pre-Proto-Samoyed influence on Tocharian, proposing among other things a comparison of the vowel systems. I will discuss this comparison and give an alternative interpretation. Three difficulties remained with Peyrot's comparison regarding details of 1) the relative chronology of Tocharian sound changes, 2) the mechanism of change, and 3) the relative chronology of sound changes in Samoyed. After addressing these problems in more detail, I conclude that a different vowel comparison is possible, so that the hypothesis that pre-Proto-Tocharians were in contact with pre-Proto-Samoyed substrate is still plausible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the accusative Uralic languages with the Samoyedic common object suffix, *m, that has no individual case form for a direct object. The *m-accusative in Uralic languages lacks the category of grammatical gender and is a result of terminological confusion. Grammatical structure of Uralic languages consists in the contrasting indefiniteness and definiteness. A direct object can be expressed by more than one different case in Uralic. The absence of actual accusative in Uralic languages fulfills the language universal which need not have any grammatical gender category.