 Okay, well, thanks for coming. As you can see, it's a very pretentious title, but basically what I want to do here, I want to talk a little bit about this language, because unlike Bantu, which everybody knows, not many people know about this. No, it's not Bantu. So that's what I wanted to talk a little bit about this language in general, and then about our project, which includes Tundra Nenets as one of the languages. So that's the genetic tree of Uralic languages taken from the Internet somewhere, and Tundra Nenets sits in this part in that group. It's part of the Samoyedic subgroup of Uralic. And as you can see, there are many other languages related, but the Samoyedic group, it's probably the most eastern and the most northern subgroup of Uralic languages. The better known Uralic languages include Finnish and Hungarian, which Hungarian is here, Finnish is there, but they're spoken in the European part of Russia and Europe. And this branch, Samoyedic branch, where Tundra Nenets belongs, they're mostly spoken in the Asian part of Russia, in Siberia basically, in Western Siberia, which is behind the Ural Mountains. Yeah, so that's another map. It actually looks very nice, except that you can't see it very well on this slide, but the map itself is beautiful, and it was compiled by the Finno-Jugrik Society in Finland, that's where I took it from. And that's the area where the Uralic languages are spoken. As you can see here, the Samoyedic languages are in that part. Yeah, so that's the northern part of European Russia and Western Siberia. A lot of it is behind the Polo Circle. Okay, so that's the Tundra Nenets. And that's a very vast area, as you can see here, which doesn't actually do justice to this language because there aren't that many speakers, in fact. Well, there are various estimates, but probably currently about 20,000 speakers. And obviously, the language is highly endangered. But the area is still vast, and it's vast for the reason that, well, basically it's Tundra, which means very, very, very huge flat land and nomadic cultures. Okay, I can show you a couple of pictures. These are my own pictures. That's how the typical Tundra Nenets village looks like in the summer. And that's my own picture taken a few years ago. That's the village of Nelmenos, spoken in that area, roughly. And as you can see here, it's very, very flat. So it's just these buildings in the middle of nowhere. And then you have miles and miles and miles of Tundra. It was pretty much nothing. Yeah, that's another one. You can see here that's the vast land. And that's another picture of Tundra. So obviously, in winter, it's covered with snow. But look at this white stuff. What do you think it is? That's not winter, okay? It's not snow. Not exactly, but clothes. Like, exactly. So that's the most, it's called lichen in English, as far as I know, which is the main food for reindeer. And that's why it's extremely important for the Tundra Nenets culture, because reindeer breeding is the most important traditional activity. Let's put it this way for these people. That's how it looks if you look at it closer. So basically, the Tundra is covered with lichen. And once reindeer eat up all the food in a particular area, then of course you have to migrate to the new area. And that's the basis of that traditional economy. Of course, now most of the Tundra Nenets people do not nomadize. They live in these little villages, which I showed you. That's how it looks like. And only some families are still living the traditional lifestyle and semi-nomadic lifestyle, I would suggest. So they migrate with their reindeer. So that's, by the way, the reindeer sled, the summer sleds, so to say, they have different types of sleds for winter and for summer. This is actually lighter, obviously, because it's more difficult to drag a sled when there is no snow. So that picture captures the moment when the reindeer breeders actually visited the village to buy stuff from the local shop. And then they just go away with the sleds. And that's how the people look. That's one of the speakers of the language. He's the actual Tundra Nenets person, because he practices the traditional activity, reindeer breeding. Yeah, that's another picture of the people. This is taken in the village. That's just how our language consultants look like. And finally, another one. But only half of these people are Nenets, as you can see. The other half is not, but this is the traditional closing, traditional patterns. As you can guess, they imitate reindeer antlers. So basically everything, the traditional economy, art, it all goes around reindeer breeding. Now, the language, as I said, is highly endangered because, well, it varies from one area to another area. As I said, it covers a huge area. And the sociolinguistic situation in different parts of the Nenets area, they're slightly different. In some parts, the knowledge of the language is much higher than in other parts. And obviously, the more to the north you go, the better the language proficiency is. But more to the south, obviously, there is more contact with the Russian language, and especially with the people who are involved in all sort of oil and gas developments in the Nenets land. Then the level of proficiency in the Nenets goes down significantly to the extent that the youngest speakers are probably all over 60. And the children do not really learn the language. But the language is not undescribed and it's not undocumented. There's quite a lot of research. There's grammar, quite a lot of grammatical studies, good dictionaries. And so we know pretty much everything about this language. But what is mostly interesting is that you can actually hear it on the Internet these days. And I want to refer to these two sources, which I think are just wonderful. That one gives you a phrase book where you can find everyday language. Unfortunately, it's in Russian but with some English explanation. You can hear the language sentence by sentence. And this one is a collection of texts. That one is mostly meant for the learners of the language. And this is mostly meant for linguists. So that's the collection of texts with linguistic analysis, glosses and some additional information. And that's quite a useful resource, I would say, because you can actually do search there and you can search for a particular grammatical feature if you want to. Okay, so that's the basic introduction into the language. Now, why am I actually studying this language? Well, it has a lot of interesting stuff in its grammar. And in particular, the phenomenon at which we are looking within this project called prominent internal possessors. And that's our project, which was funded by AHSC. And it started now a year and a half ago and goes for three years until November 2018. It's hosted here at SOAS. And as you can see, it involves these four people. So myself and Andrash were based here at SOAS. And these two people are based at the University of Suri. So that's a joint project between SOAS and the University of Suri. The project is not exclusively about Tundra Nenets. Okay, but Tundra Nenets is one of our target languages. And the reason it's there in this project is that it demonstrates this phenomenon of prominent internal possessors, which I'm going to talk about in a minute. So since we do have a mixed audience here, people who are linguists and people who are not linguists, I'll try to explain it in very non-technical terms in a very simple language, so to say. So what is it about? Well, it's basically about possessive constructions. And as we know, possessive constructions, you know, standard possessive constructions involve two elements, the possessed noun and the possessor, right? So in this English phrase, Mary's children, the possessed noun children and the possessor Mary, obviously. And usually in linguistics, we say that the possessed noun is the head of the phrase and the possessor is the dependent. Well, it means a lot of different things, but in particular it means that this part, the head element, is more prominent in syntax with respect to many different phenomena. That's why it's the head of the phrase. What are these phenomena? Well, there are two phenomena we're looking at. First, the head normally determines agreement on the verb, right? So, in English, we can say Mary's children are sleeping. What you cannot say, you cannot say Mary's children is sleeping, because if you have is, it will agree with the non-head element. And what we're doing it, we need agreement with the head element. That's how English works and that's how most other languages work. So that's one phenomenon. Another phenomenon where the notion of head is extremely important is what linguists call switch reference. But if you use non-technical language, it's basically what determines the identity of the subject, no subject. So in English, you can say Mary's children played while waiting. And who is waiting here? Well, obviously children. You cannot understand the sentence that Mary was waiting, right? So this zero is controlled by children, again by the head of the possessive phrase. And in English, in English, you cannot understand the possessor controls agreement. However, and most languages are like that. The notion of head is extremely important in grammatical theory, as you know. And in fact, many syntactic theories are kind of built around this notion of head. However, interestingly, there are languages where this strict relationship is violated. And tenderness happens to be one of them. So in these languages, it's precisely this kind of structure which would be possible, unlike in English. So you would say something like Mary's children is sleeping, where the verb is will cross reference Mary, the possessor, rather than the possessed. And that's what I basically said. There are languages where this kind of structure is possible, or this kind of structure is possible. Mary's children played while waiting, and waiting would refer to Mary rather than children. So what is happening here is that the possessor behaves more prominently in syntax than the possessed noun, contrary to what we would expect from the normal syntactic assumptions. And that's what we call prominent internal possessors. Because these possessors, they remain internal to the noun phrase, but they show some signs of prominence, syntactic prominence outside of the noun phrase. And that's what we decided to study within this project. I have to say that there are not that many languages which have these features, but there are some languages and they're genetically unrelated. They come from different parts of the globe. Tundrainans happens to be one of them. Yeah, so we call this phenomenon prominent internal possessors or pips. That's our acronym which we use. And this phenomenon is very interesting. Well, it's interesting in many different respects, but it's interesting for grammatical theory for two main reasons. Well, the first reason is the notion of head. It kind of challenges this very basic assumption of syntactic theory that syntax is based around the notion of head. Because here we have a clear example when a non-head element shows some prominent features in a sense more prominent than the head element. And this of course raises the question, do we actually need such a strict division between the head and the dependent? Maybe there are some degrees of headedness, right? How do we actually conceptualize it in syntactic theory? So that's one theoretical reason why this stuff is challenging for grammatical theory. And the second reason is this also raises the questions about the nature of the agreement relation and the nature of the switch reference relation. Do these relations work on sort of structural configurations only or maybe they refer to some other levels of representation? So for example, we have evidence that in the languages where you do have this pips phenomenon, the possessor which behaves prominently in syntax, it's also functionally prominent. It means that it has some special level of importance for the speaker or topicality or some other feature. And if your relationship of agreement or switch reference targets this prominent possessor, we might want to ask, is it a purely structural relationship or maybe it targets functional information? So these are all very central questions for grammatical for syntactic theory and that's why the study of these languages is actually important for the linguistic theory in general. So these are the goals of our project. The first goal is to present a systematic cross-linguistic study of the pips phenomenon. And as I said, we do have quite a few languages which show it from different parts of the world on the world. In terms of geography, a lot of languages from sort of northern India, Nepal area have this phenomenon. They're in the Aryan languages and some Tibetan languages. Also some Turkic languages do have this phenomenon, some languages of South America. That's what we found so far. But there are more. So sporadically they appear here and there around the globe. So first we are going to collect as much information about this phenomenon as possible. And second we are going to present a detailed case studies of four target languages and as you can see Tundra Nenets is one of them. But we also have Turkish, which is of course a well-studied and a bigger language. But surprisingly this phenomenon in Turkish hasn't been studied very much, which was really an amazing discovery for us. Given that there are many Turkish grammars and plenty of syntaxations who started this language, but not many people paid attention to this. That language, it was actually the first language where this phenomenon was discovered. If you like, it's in the Aryan language and it has a very interesting system of agreement, which can be controlled by various elements including the possessors. And finally this isolate language from Bolivia, which also has the same phenomenon. So these are our target languages and for these languages we actually do field work and work with the language consultants. So what are we planning to reach at the end? Right, several research outputs. Well first of all we did have this workshop on prominent internal possessors here at SOAS a couple of months ago, which I thought was quite well attended for two days event. And then of course we are going to publish papers including a volume which will be based on the materials presented in this workshop. And I'm very happy to say that the proposal has been accepted by Oxford University Press just recently, a couple of weeks ago. So we are now collecting papers and hopefully it will be published in a year or two. And there will also be a database which will be publicly available and fully querable for various variables related to this phenomenon. It will be hosted by the University of Surrey, which as you know is maybe is very good at creating typological databases. Okay, so they have very detailed tools of how to deal with this kind of material. And this database on PIPs will be added to their existing databases. Yeah, so that's our goal and we still have almost two years to go. But I guess the main message which I wanted to pass here is that you know looking at these languages, you can the languages which are not really studied very well, you can really discover amazing phenomena which are really, really relevant for the general theory of how language should look like. And I guess the study of this phenomena is the only valid academic reason of dealing with languages which are endangered. Yeah, I guess that's my main message. Thank you. Are you going back to Tundra any time soon? No, probably not because we actually have a possibility to invite the consultants, well not here but to Finland where I have a couple of colleagues who also work on the same language. So we usually have fieldwork sessions there and it's been working quite well. I have to say consultants are very happy to go there and I'm quite happy to go there too. Yeah and it's a bit better in terms of working conditions because if you go there people are usually busy with their lives and you don't really want to intervene too much. And since I'm not recording any natural communicative events or anything like that, it doesn't really matter for me if I work within the community or outside here. Yeah. Well, if you say it's Peter what you're saying, you know, Mary's children is waiting or whatever in this particular language, how do they then actually make clear that it's the children that are waiting, the possessed, how do they make, that they have to have something to talk to her? Yeah, that's a good question. In fact, in all languages which have this phenomena, this is not the only way of expressing possessive construction. There is always a choice, okay, that's just one of the available possessive constructions. But you can use non-pip construction which will be pretty much the same as English. Okay, so they exist in parallel, so to say. And that this of course raises further question, why do you need this at all? And that's where all this function of factors which I mentioned play a role. So if you question your fellow for the notion of headlessness and things like that, are there other areas of the grammar that you think you can see now as well? Yeah, that's also a good question. Actually, yes, and actually in Tundra Nenets, it turns out that peeps, well, first of all, they behave like causal arguments in terms of the switch reference, but they also behave like causal arguments in terms of control of reflexivization, for example, right, which is kind of amazing given that the possessive still stays inside the noun phrase and that's the only sub-close level element which can behave this way in terms of reflexivization control. Yeah, also I have a suspicion, we haven't looked at it very much yet, but I have a suspicion they may be more accessible to relativization than non-pip possessors. Yeah, so there is a range of phenomena where they clearly show some kind of syntactic prominence. Yeah, okay, thank you.