Citation and quotation markers in Northern Selkup idioms: From native to borrowed ones

The article discusses four discourse particles found in the Northern Selkup dialects. The Selkup particles mark the so-called “reported speech” and thus have two different functions: the function of citation (the speaker retells someone else’s words or formulates his/her own utterance to be transmitted by the hearer to a third party), and the function of quotation (the author of the text marks a text fragment as representing a reported speech). It is shown that the semantics of these particles actively interact with the semantics of evidential forms (evidentiality constitutes the semantic core of the Selkup verbal system). The article describes the functions of these Selkup particles and their semantic evolution.

In addition, these particles, quite expectedly for discursive markers, represent an extremely interesting material in view of the various contact situations the Northern Selkup idioms took part in. I describe the mol particle, a Russian loan embedded in the system of these particles. This borrowing is an example of the classical grammaticalization cycle where the grammatical means are “updated” through substitution of original markers by borrowed ones. The very existence of the original Selkup system of “reported speech”-particles can be regarded as a “catalyst” for the borrowing of mol, and specific functions of the native particles contributed to the semantic change the borrowed particle mol underwent in Selkup. This case of a contact-induced change in the original system of “reported speech”-particles is compared with two other similar cases in the same semantic domain. The first is the semantics of the Selkup particle myta, seemingly, a Khanty borrowing. The second is evidence from Nganasan where citation forms were developed on the basis of evidential forms. Though unique against the other Northern Samoyedic languages, Nganasan citation forms demonstrate striking functional similarities with Northern Selkup forms, which also may represent a trace of (historically unattested) language contacts. Moreover, the case of Selkup-Nganasan linguistic interaction may also reveal reverse structural and material borrowing from Selkup to Nganasan. A comparison of these three contact situations (Selkup-Russian, Selkup-Khanty, and Selkup-Nganasan) contributes to the typology of language interaction mechanisms: the article discusses various semantic outcomes of linguistic elements borrowing in contact situations with different sociolinguistic characteristics.