Agent and patient marking (Synja Khanty)

APmkNon: The language has no strategies to distinguish agent and patient.

APmk=WO: The agent and patient are marked through the use of word order.

APmk=Case: The agent and patient are marked through the use of case marking alignment.


(1) pōx ńāń lē-l.

boy bread eat-prs.3sg

‘The boy is eating bread.’ (S. O.)


(2) pōx lē-l ńāń.

boy eat-prs.3sg bread

‘The boy is eating bread.’ (S. O.)


(3)    ńāwrem   luwel kaš-l-ǝli.

       child         (s)he.acc look_for-prs-obj.3sg

       ‘The child is looking for him/her.’ (S. O.)


In Synja Khanty, nouns are unmarked in the nominative and the accusative cases (Honti 1984), thus the agent and the patient roles are not differentiated morphologically (as opposed to personal pronouns which have accusative forms (3)). The default word order is SOV (Csepregi 2010a, Nikolaeva 1999a, 1999c Dalrymple‒Nikolaeva 2011), which means that the agent typically precedes the patient (and the verbal predicate), however other configurations are also possible (e.g. SVO).

Author: 

Nikolett F. Gulyás