Syntheticism of verbal inflection (Northern Mansi)

CpW=3: The category-­per-­word value is 4.


(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
‘they were taken by those two’ (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 person marker is synthetic in a sense that the suffix codes the person and number of the agent simultaneously. The maximum number of suffixes that a verb form can take is four (cf. (1) and (2)).

Author: 

Szilvia Németh