Number of verbal inflectional categories (Northern Mansi)

CpW=6: Number of verbal inflectional categories is 6.


(1) toti-nuw-aγ-ǝm

take-cond-du.obj-prs.1sg

‘I would take those two’ (Kálmán 1976: 59)


(2) tota-we-s-yγ

take-pass-pst-3du

‘was taken by the two of them’ (Kálmán 1976: 59)


In Northern Mansi, the following categories can be expressed on the verb form: the number and person of the subject, tense, voice, mood, and the number of the object (Kálmán 1976). The active voice, the indicative mood and singular objects are marked with zero morphemes. The present tense can be marked either by an overt tense marker or by a zero morpheme. The examples (1) and (2) have three distinct suffixes in the verb forms. The person marker is synthetic in a sense that the suffix codes the person and number of the agent simultaneously.

Author: 

Szilvia Németh