A database of contexts with polypredicative reason constructions in the New Testament

This paper is dedicated to the Differential Object Marking system in the Christian Urmi idiom (NENA dialects < Semitic < Afro-Asiatic language family), spoken in the village of Urmiya, Russia. Both indexing and flagging are employed in this idiom for object marking, with either technique showing rather optional use. The paper investigates the way the prominence of a direct object on the one hand, and the informational structure on the other, influence the object marking. The study is based on material that includes texts obtained by elicitation, recorded spontaneous texts, and a fairy tale translated specifically for the research. The findings show the effects of the direct object’s prominence to be typologically expected, with the following restrictions coming into play: inanimate objects cannot be marked by flagging, while interlocutors, on the contrary, tend to be more frequently marked by means of flagging. Christian Urmi has three sets of indexes that are selected depending on the aspect and tense form of the verb. The frequency of using these sets of indexes varies greatly, with flagging preferably chosen for past tense and indexing mostly found with present-stem-derived forms. In progressive and resultative tenses, indexes and flagging show equal frequency of occurrence. The influence of the informational structure seems to be as follows. Flagging is used to encode direct objects which have been a) shifted from their subject role, b) disrupted by other referents in the immediately preceding register, or c) which occur with verbs that imply a high level of the object’s involvement.