Secondary depictive and resultative predication in and Chukchi's designative case

Abstract

This study re-approaches the morphosyntax of the Chukchi designative case, a minor predicative case whose central function is the encoding of secondary depictive and resultative predicates. Although the designative case has been covered in Chukchi grammaticography (Bogoras 1922; Skorik 1961, 1977; Dunn 1999; Kämpfe & Volodin 1995), these accounts offer diverging and partly contradicting accounts concerning its compatibility with certain nominal parts of speech; of central relevance is the account of Inenlikej (1974) who went as far and denied the existence of a designative case altogether. A dedicated study of the syntax and semantics of the designative case has however, so far, not been attempted. Based on a manually glossed corpus of almost 13000 orthographic Chukchi words and additional electronically searchable Chukchi materials, this study covers the designative case from the perspective of participant-oriented adjuncts (Himmelmann & Schultze-Berndt 2005) and a recent questionnaire on secondary predication in Uralic Languages (Groot 2017). Since a number of Northern Eurasian languages have cases with a similar function e.g, Yukaghiric, Eskimo, several Uralic languages as well as Chukchi’s genetic relatives Koryak, Alutor and Itelmen, some cross-linguistic comparisons finalize this study.
 
 Keywords: Chukchi, designative case, depictive secondary predication, resultative secondary predication, participant-oriented adjuncts, Chukotko-Kamchadal languages, Yukaghir languages, Siberian Yupik Eskimo, Uralic languages