LFG and Finno-Ugric languages

The chapter discusses some salient, sometimes competing, LFG analyses of a variety of (morpho-)syntactic phenomena in Finno-Ugric languages, with occasional glimpses at alternative generative approaches and at some related phenomena in languages belonging to Samoyedic, the other major branch of Uralic languages. We concentrate on clausal c-structure representational issues, verbal modifiers, focused constituents, negation, copula constructions, argument realization, subject-verb agreement, differential object marking, evidentiality and a set of noun phrase phenomena related to event nominalization. It argues that LFG provides an appropriate and suitably flexible formal apparatus for a principled analysis of all the phenomena in all the Finno-Ugric languages discussed here. In addition, it shows that the analysis of some of these phenomena can also contribute to LFG-internal theorizing.