Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 109. kötet (2013)
Tanulmányok - Simoncsics, Péter: Linguistic gestures: On negation, with special reference to the Permian languages 151
On negation, with special reference to the Permian languages 153 Thus linguistic negation in the Uralic languages seems to be a more personal business than in Indo-European languages, where impersonal negative particles are used to represent and emphasize, even overemphasize, the logical aspect of negation. The real space where negation as well as position (and communication in general) goes on is personal in every language community. In the Uralic languages, however, by virtue of personal markers attached to the negative auxiliary stem, negation is more marked linguistically than in most Indo-European languages. Thus Uralic negation takes place in a distinctively personal space established by the participants in the speech situation: the speaker, the listener, and a third person who is distant from both and/or a virtual player and may represent also the speech act itself. This space can be best demonstrated by the so-called T-structure introduced by János Lotz (1967): 1 ------- 2 3 where speaker (SG 1) and listener (SG2) form a common axis of discourse tt is close, intimate and real and contrasts with (SG3) that is located further away, distant, and even virtual. As an example of this axis let us consider the positive and negative paradigms of Udmurt in singular present: Present Positive VXSG1 min=isko 2 min=isko-d 3 mine ’I walk’ ’you walk’ ’(s)he walks Negative и-g min=iski u-d min=iski и-g mini T don’t walk’ ’you don’t walk’ ’(s)he doesn’t walk’ Here the morpheme =iski in VXSG1 and VXSG2, but clearly absent in SG3, has a role different from the way the reflexive suffix is usually taxonomized. In my analysis it is a kind of affective morpheme uniting the proximate speech participants you and me against a more distant him/her. Concerning totality to be expressed negative phrases equal „normal”, i.e. positive verbs in respect to tense, mood, person and number. But the negative auxiliary has a full paradigm only in Nganasan, as mentioned above. Categories that happen to be missing from auxiliaries (tense and mood) reemerge and are marked on the connegative main verb. In fact, in Permian as well as in Mari negative auxiliaries in the present tense carry the marker -k-l-g- and - y-, respectively, both being historically identical with the present marker *-k- of Proto-Finno-Ugric (possibly even Proto-Uralic). By contrast, the corresponding Finnish morpheme -q- (phonetically a glottal stop), being identical with the imperative suffix, is attached to the connegative. Thus connegatives
