Lühitutvustus:
Northern Samoyed languages grammaticalize an auditive mood marking information acquired through hearing and other non-visual senses. Curiously, this marker frequently appears on speech verbs in Nganasan narrative discourse — a context where reference to auditory perception seems pragmatically redundant, since speech events are heard by definition. Such uses are, in fact, among the most frequent occurrences of the auditive in Nganasan corpora. Previous accounts have attributed this pattern to “across-the-boundary” configurations, in which interlocutors communicate across a tent threshold, a culturally salient communicative practice in Northern Siberian societies. We challenge this explanation using corpus data from Nganasan and Tundra Nenets, showing that the auditive on speech verbs occurs in a much wider range of contexts, including inner speech and face-to-face conversation. Using statistical methods, we investigate what actually conditions auditive use in both languages — and find that the two related languages tell surprisingly different stories.
