Reflexivity in Kazym Khanty

This paper discusses reflexivity strategies in the Kazym dialect of Khanty, an
endangered Uralic language spoken in northwestern Siberia. Khanty is a language
without dedicated reflexive pronouns (Nikolaeva 1995, 1999b); to express reflexivity
Kazym Khanty speakers use personal pronouns, a doubled pronoun construction or
add a particle to a personal pronoun. For a closed class of verbs in Kazym Khanty
detransitivising suffixes can be employed to convey the reflexive meaning. The
absence of dedicated reflexive pronouns is a typological rarity, cross-linguistically
they are considered the “norm” (Heine & Miyashita 2008; Moyse-Faurie 2008). The
paper presents a hypothesis about how Kazym Khanty avoids excessive anaphoric
ambiguity.