40 лет Санкт-Петербургской типологической школе

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M. Leinonen Possessive resultative perfects in Komi-Zyryan

Komi-Zyryan, which belongs to the Uralic languages and to the branch of Permic languages, is an agglutinative language with the predominant order SVO. Except for the order of the main constituents, it is a typical determiner-head language with postpositions, possessive suffixes, 15 cases, no gender, no congruence between adjectival attributes and their heads, and no copula in the present tense.

1. The tense system

The temporal categories include the simple tenses (present and past, the future tense is expressed morphologically in the third person only), and the so-callpd analytic or compound tenses. Between these stands the perfect-like construction based on a past participial form without copula, sometimes called the 2nd past, sometimes unwitnessed past, and in the new grammar of Komi unwitnessed perfect. The copula may have the forms of the simple past and the 2nd past with the participial marker — dm(a), which is neutral as to active or passive. This together with the lexical verb forms produces the analytic constructions. The order of the copula and the lexical verb may vary. The term «unwitnessed» equals evidentiality and covers in the language system the same basic variants of «indirectness» as in the Turkic, Georgian, Bulgarian etc. languages where the category is being studied: quotation, hearsay, conjecture and mirativity (see e. g. [Journal of Pragmatics 2001; Johanson & Bo Utas 2000; Guentchdva 1996]).

The paradigm of vetlyny «to go»:

In the above paradigm, the tenses are labeled by terms that give an approximate content to the categories. In the grammar, the author of the section on the verb, E. A. Cypanov, cautiously uses simply numbers for the past tenses: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th past.

2. The impersonal construction with reflexive suffix

In the literary language and the majority of the dialects, for the first person of the perfect/unwitnessed past an impersonal construction is preferred. It consists of the genitive form of the personal pronoun/animate noun and the participle-based form with the 3rd person reflexive suffix — s'oma. The meaning of the construction is always that of an involuntary or non-conscious action:

Menam dyr uz's'oma

I-GEN long sleep-REFL-PERF-3 SG

«I have slept/overslept».

The construction is specialized for the meaning of involuntary action in other tenses as well, and has parallels in other Finno-Ugric languages in that the demotion of the subject (nominative), adding a reflexive suffix (in Finnish, a causative suffix), the directionality, controllability of the action is cancelled. Unplanned actions are often expressed by this construction:

A menam tajo kodzyd lunjasys kezlo bytt'o todomon

but I-GEN this cold days-POSSDEF during as.if knowingly

vajs'oma gortys' medrad'ejtana kn'igaos

bring-REFL-PERF-3SG home-ELAT most.favored book-ACC

«But for these cold days I happened to have brought as if knowingly from home my most favourite book» [I. Toropov 1988:157].

There is another usage for the reflexive forms. In grammars, it is presented separately as an Aktionsart which expresses finality, exhaustiveness, apparently in all tenses:

Taltn kezlo udzavs'is

today during work-REFL-PST-3RD

«For today, (we/you/they) have worked enough», «Enough work has been done» [Fedjunjova 1998: 32].

3. Genitive possessor and impersonal perfect with — oma

In Komi-Zyryan, a development seems to be taking place which is very natural, and possibly aided by areal influence: the genitive subject appears together with the — oma perfect, which is invariant, that is, impersonal. With transitive verbs, the object is either in the nominative or in the accusative. When nominative, the object can be called a subject, as in other languages which express their perfects with habere verbs:

Menam stavys das'toma

I-GEN all-NOMDEF prepare-PERF-3 SG