Marriage bear-hunting & dangerous things Eastern Khanty Agent-demotion constructions

Abstract

Choice of constructions - cognitive faculty, discourse coherence in context, structuring information, affecting linguistic form (morphosyntax). System's grammatical resources - pragmatic and semantic properties - speaker’s choice. Agent-demotion constructions = de-transitive events, multiple referents, competing salience. Agented passive and ergative constructions = parenthetical shifts in agent salience, gradience in discourse prominence, primary and secondary topicality = promotion/demotion, foregrouonding/backgrounding, Loc.case, grammatical relation shift.