Comitative and Terminative in Votic and Lower Luga Ingrian
Comitative and Terminative in Votic and Lower Luga Ingrian

Summary/Abstract: The paper addresses the status of the comitative and terminative in contemporary Votic and Lower Luga Ingrian. In published sources on Votic, both markers were qualified in the same way: either as case markers or as postpositions. For Ingrian, no detailed research of the question was ever conducted. The analysis presented in this paper is based on a set of phonetic, morphological and syntactic criteria comparing the comitative and terminative with prototypical cases and postpositions in both languages. The resulting scale shows that the comitative behaves quite differently from the terminative. Both ­markers are neither unambiguous cases nor postpositions, but the terminative demonstrates mostly postpositional features while the comitative is rather close to a case. The status of the comitative and terminative in Lower Luga Ingrian is similar but not identical to Votic; in particular the Ingrian comitative marker has harmonic variants but cannot mark adjectives in NP. A very specific feature of Lower Luga Ingrian is the coexistence of parallel comitative forms with and without -n (-nka/-nkä vs. -ka/-kä). Both variants probably emerged under the Votic influence, and represent two different strategies of borrowing.

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