Morphological pecularities of non-lexical verbs in Enets

The article summarizes the information on the morphological features of Forest and Tundra Enets (Northern Samoyedic < Samoyedic < Uralic) non-lexical verbs, namely the copula, negative verbs, the modal-interrogative verb and the placeholder. In Forest Enets, in contrast to Tundra Enets, the copula has two suppletive stems that display an almost complementary distribution, although there are some exceptional uses in the data. The main negative verb has two complementarily distributed stems in both dialects, and their distribution is close to the one of the basic stem and of the indefinite tense stem of regular verbs. The main negative verb has other morphological peculiarities: first, the single imperative form does not distinguish between the subject, subject-object and middle conjugations as other verbs do; second, it has dedicated ‘contrastive forms’ of the indefinite tense and of the interrogative mood; third, in Forest Enets, it has an irregular form of the interrogative marker. The other negative verbs have defective paradigms: the verb denoting ‘not at all’ has the indefinite tense and the interrogative mood, the verb denoting ‘almost’ has the indefinite tense and the inferential mood, while the verb denoting ‘of course’ has only the indefinite tense. The modal-interrogative verb is only attested in Forest Enets and has only the indefinite tense form of the subject-object conjugation. The placeholder has all nominal and verbal forms built from the same stem. The paper is based on field materials collected and processed with the author’s participation: a glossed corpus of spontaneous Enets texts (includes about 25 hours of speech records in the Forest Enets dialect and about 7 hours of speech records in the Tundra Enets dialect), and elicited examples.