Anne Tamm (Károli Gáspár Református Egyetem, CEU)

Tagadás az uráli nyelvekben: nyelvtipológiákon túl

(magyar nyelven, the presentation is Hungarian with English handouts/powerpoint)

Typology divides languages into groups according to their behavior. How languages pattern into these groups is partly determined by areal influences and partly by the genealogical origin of these languages. Do the categories established by means of observing the behavior of a vast amount of genealogically and areally related as well as unrelated languages give an idea of how we categorize our experience? 

This short note discusses this question, using the examples from Uralic languages. One of the wide-spread and interesting features of the Uralic languages is its negative verb. This means that unlike Hungarian and many other better known languages of Europe, which have a negative particle and an inflected main verb in a negated sentence, many other Uralic languages have a negative verb that takes the inflections while the main verb is stripped of inflections in negated sentences.