Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 109. kötet (2013)
Tanulmányok - Simoncsics, Péter: Linguistic gestures: On negation, with special reference to the Permian languages 151
156 SlMONCStCS, PÉTER 2. Solving the problem from the outside: extralinguistic effects I suggest that the distribution of it- ~ o- and e- ~ ё- stems in respect of present indicative and non-present tenses and moods offers a clue. Present tense is close to the axis formed by the speaker and the listener and is simultaneous with the speech act, which makes the message it carries more actual and emphatically more informative. Since negation is by itself emphatic and semantically richer, and may also convey, in addition to its logical content, personal attitudes of the speaker distinguishing himself from other participants and/or constituents of the speech act and may express refusal, distantiation, abhorrence etc., and, as a consequence, it is accompanied, more often than not, by bodily gestures as well. These may include facial expressions, such as grimaces, as well as lip-rounding, which is the most economical of facial gestures, demanding the least muscular effort. It is worth emphasizing that negative auxiliaries as they usually appear in Permian, as well as in other cognate and non-cognate languages, are introductory elements of a phrase, so their initials are, by nature, the most prominent constituents of the utterance in question. Labial и— о- initials when compared to illabial e— ё- initials are more visible and hie et mine reveal more about the emotions concomitant with negation to the partner in the speech act, i.e. the listener. Negation expressed by negative auxiliaries in Uralic thus represents a complex linguistic phenomenon where a logical operation is combined with phonic representations of emotions and sentiments of persons directly involved in the act of negating, since negation takes place in a space overtly defined by grammatical persons. In some cognate languages and specifically in Permian, negative emotions and sentiments of the speaker also exert an influence on the phonic material used in negation in the form of facial gestures, such as the labialization of illabial vowels. Steinitz’s hints in this direction when he writes „In mehreren ursprünglichen] vordervokalischen Wörtern ist es - wohl unabhängig vom Sy[rjänischen] - neu entstanden, wohl in Zusammenhang mit der (bisher unerklärten) doppelten Entwicklung von *e > wotj[akisch] о und u...)” (Steinitz 1944: 129). Although Steinitz cites several examples showing this „unexplained” vowel-change from front vowels to back ones (see again footnote1), he omits mentioning the Udmurt negative stem u- and its Komi counterpart o-, although both fit well into the process of a ffont-to-back change from e or ё to о and a further step from a Pre-Proto-Permian о to и in Udmurt (**e- > *o- > u-). Approaching the problem from an angle slightly different from that of Steinitz, as I see it the negative o- ~ it- stem developed from the original Uralic *e- stem and was preserved until the dissolution of Proto-Permian. And the fact that a geographically close cognate, Mari, ceteris paribus, also uses о-stem negative auxiliaries in the present tense indicates that the process of the labialization
