Nº 1 (2025)

The present article deals with the study of the rhetorical question as a distinct communicative act, whose specificity lies in the speaker’s attempt to express their conviction regarding the nature of a certain fragment of the world and, if possible, convey this conviction to the listener. Therefore, a rhetorical question is not merely a question that does not require an answer but one that does not even allow for an answer. The particular communicative effect of a rhetorical question is achieved because the speaker makes an attempt to impose their conviction on the listener indirectly: the listener is encouraged to find the answer, which is already known to the speaker and encoded in the question itself. We propose distinguishing between three types of convictions that make up the content of a rhetorical question — qualifying, deontic, and assertive — and demonstrate that Russian possesses specific linguistic means to convey each type of conviction through a rhetorical question.

In this paper, we focus on Russian quantified noun phrases that are known to be able to trigger plural verbal agreement or no agreement at all. Descriptively, we offer a novel generalization: when such phrases trigger plural verbal agreement, they cannot be interpreted in the immediate scope of negation. We show that this generalization falls out if these plural-agreeing phrases are treated in semantics as individual-denoting choice-functional indefinites and not as generalized quantifiers. Theoretically, we speculate that interpretable number features are in principle incompatible with generalized quantifier denotations.

This paper studies the morphosyntactic properties of bound proprietive and privative markers in some Uralic languages using corpus data and grammatical descriptions. Such affixes attach to substantive bases and form derivatives with the meaning of ‘possessing X’ and ‘deprived of X’, respectively. The paper considers the material of Tundra Nenets, Moksha, Hill Mari, Mansi, Khanty, Udmurt and Finnish. Firstly, morphosyntactic properties of proprietive and privative affixes are compared across different languages and in a given language system. It is shown that, although they have no less restrictions on the derivational base than proprietive ones, privative markers are fewer in number and often coincide with adverbial caritive markers. It is argued that privative is marked in relation to proprietive. Then the status of the affixes as inflectional or derivational markers is discussed. Most of the considered proprietive and privative affixes cannot be analyzed as either. Affixes that combine the functions of attributivizers and (comitative or caritive) adverbial markers preserve more of the internal nominal syntax of the base, but to the lesser extent than the core cases in a given language. Thus, the data testify that the studied attributive markers deviate more from the inflectional prototype than the corresponding adverbial markers.

Udmurt bezmen ‘steelyard balance, weigher’ may be a borrowing from Russian bezmen ‘steelyard balance’ or from Tatar bizmän ‘id.’. Tatar, Bashkir bizmän have parallels only in the Karachay-Balkar and Kumyk languages (bazman ‘steelyard balance’ with back vocalism). Previously proposed etymologies for Tat., Bash. bizmän and Russian bezmen (from Persian *vaznān ‘weights’ < Arabic wazn ‘weight’, from Arabic mīzān ‘weigher’, from Bulgarian *viśmen ‘weigher’ < Chuvash viś ‘to weigh’) meet serious objections and cannot be accepted. Rus. bezmen is known since the turn of the XII–XIII centuries, and its old meaning ‘a weight measure’ allows one to compare it with the word known almost in all Turkic languages of Central Asia, in Karluk, Oguz and Kipchak: batman ‘weight measure (different for different goods)’ (from the XVI^th century also known in Russian). In addition, for the Turkic languages one can reconstruct *basman / *bäśmän ‘weight measure’, preserved only in Chuvash pasman(a) ‘id.’ (and possibly in Kumyk and Karachay-Balkar bazman) and also borrowed into Russian. Turk. *basman / *bäśmän could be the source (via Volga-Bulgarian) for Rus. bezmen (which, as suggested in etymological dictionaries, has been reinterpreted according to folk etymology as bezmen). The origin of the Turkic doublet batman ~ *basman / *bäśmän is due to the role of the Iranian languages in international trade in the early Middle Ages in Central Asia: batman was borrowed from Sogdian p’tm’n ‘measure’ (< *pati-mān ‘(co-)measurement’) in the zone of influence of the Sogdian language, and basman / *bäśmän come from the Khwaresmian p’cm’n ‘measure’ (with palatalization *ti > c) in the zone of influence of the Khwaresmian language, in the Volga region.