The article presents research outcomes concerning functional peculiarities of the verb tăjtɨ/täjtɨ ‘have’ in the northern Khanty dialects: Kazym, Shuryshkar and Priural (Obdorsk). Data for analysis – 88 texts totaling in 7046 sentences – have been elicited mainly from the text corpus of Western Khanty dialects edited by E. V. Kashkin (2012–2014), electronic publication available at https://osf.io/uraqx/files/ and from the corpus by I. N. Nikolaeva [1], electronic publication available at http://larkpie.net/siberianlanguages/northern-khanty. Besides, some elicitations were obtained from I. M. Moldanova, a native speaker of the Kazym dialect. The present study is conducted within the methodology of the functional theory of grammar.
The verb tăjtɨ/täjtɨ ‘have’ is a bivalent verb, its subject is the possessor and its direct object is the possessed. According to L. Stassen’s classification of the predicative strategies used to encode possession [2], the have-verb constructs a transitive possessive strategy. This strategy is the most common in the Northern Khanty. While encoding possession, the transitive have-verb is used only in the subject conjugation since it presents the possessive relation as a state. Our study of the northern dialects language data shows that the verb tăjtɨ/täjtɨ ‘have’ can also take forms of the objective conjugation and passive voice. In the forms of the objective conjugation and passive voice tăjtɨ/täjtɨ can be used independently or as a part of an analytical construction, wherein its possessive semantics can be lost partially or fully. Being used as an independent unit, the verb tăjtɨ/täjtɨ conveys an idea of keeping, wearing, holding, etc. The analytical construction consists of the verb tăjtɨ/täjtɨ in the forms of the objective conjugation or passive voice and a converb marked by the suffix -man. Translations of this construction into Russian and English languages show that the converb functions a notional element, while tăjtɨ/täjtɨ, as a part of this analytical construction, is used like an auxiliary verb. In the analyzed data, 31 occurrences of the analytical constructions with the verb tăjtɨ/täjtɨ were found and 55 occurrences of this verb in the independent use.