On the syntactic structure of the Tungusic languages

The paper substantiates the proposal that the Tungusic languages belong to the languages of the nominative-possessive structure. The attributive possessive relations and predicative relations are the grammatical essence of the syntactic structure of these languages. The distinction between attributivity and predicativity lies not only in the fact that the attributive relations can exist within the constituents of the phrase being able to be an independent sentence constituent but not a completed sentence while the predicative relations characterize the binding between the main parts of the sentence forming a completed sentence. The attributive and predicative syntagmas differ as far as the forms of their expression are concerned: the former is represented by a possessive paradigm where the first component is expressed by a caseless form of a possessive pronoun or an adjective formed as a result of conversion and the second component of the attributive syntagma is expressed by a word of the noun class the possessive suffix of which shows the person and number of the first component of the attributive syntagma. Another paradigm is a predicative one represented by the main parts of the sentence: the subject expressed by a word of the noun class in the nominative case and the verbal or nominal predicate having personal markers showing the person and number of the subject of action.

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