The book is the first substantial description of Tundra Nenets, a highly endangered Uralic language spoken in Western Siberia and the north of European Russia, destined for the international linguistic community. Its purpose is to provide a thorough documentation of all of the major grammatical phenomena in the language. The grammar particularly emphasizes the description of syntax, because this has traditionally been a very neglected area of Nenets studies. Many syntactic aspects have not received a systematic treatment in the existing literature or have not been addressed at all. Since the existing works are not easily available, incomplete, or idiosyncratically presented, Tundra Nenets syntax has played little or no role in the considerations of modern linguists, whether more descriptively or theoretically inclined. The book is largely descriptive: it is not intended to address theoretical questions per se and the description is not meant to be formulated within a particular framework. However, it identifies and discusses issues which are of broad typological and theoretical interest. The description is richly exemplified. Most of the cited examples are the result of fieldwork conducted by the in various locations. They are sentences produced by native speakers either spontaneously or elicited in response to questions posed in Russian. Other examples are excerpts from original texts.

The book is the first substantial description of Tundra Nenets, a Uralic language spoken in Western Siberia and the north of European Russia. It provides a lasting piece of documentation of this highly endangered language. For a language as little researched as Nenets, any aspect of grammar may prove to be of potential significance for the field of linguistics and turn out to be theoretically challenging.

With this descriptive grammar of Nganasan Beáta Wagner-Nagy presents a comprehensive description of the highly endangered Samoyedic language, spoken only by a small number of individuals on Siberia’s Taimyr Peninsula. Based on corpus data from the Nganasan Spoken Language Corpus as well as field work the grammar follows a traditional structure. Contents range from a description of phonetic features and phonological processes over word classes, morphological features to syntactic and semantic properties. The grammar highlights morphophonological alternations as well as the pragmatic organization of Nganasan. A discussion of the core vocabulary completes the account in addition to two sample texts. The grammar reflects significant typological aspects thus serving as a reasonable basis for further comparison in Uralic studies.

This volume is the first book length study into the essive, a relatively unknown case marker like English ‘as (a child)’. It focuses on the distribution of the essive in contemporary Uralic languages with special attention to the opposition between permanent and impermanent state. The volume presents large sets of new data and insights into the use of the essive in nineteen Uralic languages on the basis of a typological linguistic questionnaire. The typological variation is discussed within the linguistic domains of non-verbal main predication, secondary predication, complementation, and manner, temporal, and circumstantial adverbial phrases. The descriptions and analyses are presented in such a way that they are accessible to linguists in general, descriptive and theoretical linguists, and specialists in Uralic and/or linguistic typology. The data and approach offer many starting points for further investigations within but also outside the Uralic language family.

The grammaticalized expression of negation is a linguistic universal. This volume deals with negation in the Uralic language family in a typological perspective. As in no other major language family before, a comprehensive typological questionnaire provides the basis for the chapters documenting negation in 17 languages. Most of them are endangered. The chapters highlight negative auxiliary verbs—the special Uralic feature—and their ways of combining with the rich inventory of other negators in different types of clauses, as well as negative replies, negative indefinites, abessives/caritives/privatives, scope, polarity and emphatic negation. Selected aspects of negation, such as negative indefinites, negation of non-verbal predicates and information structure, are discussed in more detail in five further chapters. The book brings new typologically informed perspectives on negation in the Uralic family, and it provides valuable data and insights for any linguist working on negation.

Linguists and specialists on Siberia are generally familiar with the name Ket, which designates a small ethnic group on the Yenisei and their language, widely regarded as a linguistic enigma in many respects. Ket is a severely endangered language with today less than 500 native speakers. Together with Yugh, Kott, Arin, Assan and Pumpokol, all of which are completely extinct, it forms the Yeniseic family of languages, which has no known linguistic relatives. This Grammar of Ket constitutes the first book of its kind in English and is structured as follows: (1) Introduction; (2) The Kets and their Language; (3) Phonology; (4) Morphology; (5) References. A second volume is planned on Ket syntax, supported by a collection of original texts with translations and annotations.

The volume explores clause-linkage strategies from a cross-linguistic perspective with an emphasis on asyndetic constructions. The data-driven approaches focus on areal differences and similarities in using non-finite verb forms in complex sentences in languages situated in Central and Western Siberia.

Morphological Perspectives takes words as the starting point for any questions about linguistic structure: their form, their internal structure, their paradigmatic extensions, and their role in expressing and manipulating syntactic configurations.

The Languages and Linguistics of Northern Asia: A Comprehensive Guide surveys the indigenous languages of Asia’s North Pacific Rim, Siberia, and adjacent portions of Inner Eurasia. It provides in-depth descriptions of every first-order family of this vast area, with special emphasis on family-internal subdivision and dialectal differentiation. Individual chapters trace the origins and expansion of the region’s widespread pastoral-based language groups as well as the microfamilies and isolates spoken by northern Asia’s surviving hunter-gatherers. Separate chapters cover sparsely recorded languages of early Inner Eurasia that defy precise classification and the various pidgins and creoles spread over the region. Other chapters investigate the typology of salient linguistic features of the area, including vowel harmony, noun inflection, verb indexing (also known as agreement), complex morphologies, and the syntax of complex predicates. Issues relating to genealogical ancestry, areal contact and language endangerment receive equal attention. With historical connections both to Eurasia’s pastoral-based empires as well as to ancient population movements into the Americas, the steppes, taiga forests, tundra and coastal fringes of northern Asia offer a complex and fascinating object of linguistic investigation.