Pragmatic direct object Marking in Eastern Mansi

In this article I will outline one part of the effect of expressing semantic transitivity in Eastern Mansi. Mansi (Vogul) is a Uralic language spoken in Western Siberia. From the typological point of view, Eastern Mansi is a nonconfigurational language having case + agreement marking type morphosyntactic coding. The primary device for marking the direct object is verbal agreement (objective conjugation), and the function of case-marking is rather that of complementing. In this article I will discuss three main topics: 1. In what contexts does verb marking (object agreement) appear? 2. Does it appear alone or is it accompanied by a nominal object constituent? 3. When and how is the nominal object constituent marked? The theoretical basis of my study is the information structural analyses. I also make use of Differential Object Marking ( DOM ) first created by Bossong (1985) and further developed by, for example, Aissen (2003). According to my data, In Eastern Mansi, DO coding does not involve an animacy hierarchy: DO coding is primarily motivated by pragmatics. A direct object can be (1) not marked at all, (2) only verb marked, (3) both verb marked and case-marked, or (4) verb marked and marked with a possessive suffix or possessive accusative case. The variation in verb marking is based on topicality, and the role of nominal marking is to specify the object argument or to emphasize it. An object with a possessive suffix does not get any accusative marking, but with certain third person forms we use the so-called possessive accusative. Despite the earlier statements, possessive suffix does not automatically trigger the objective conjugation.