The syntactic positions of no and noh in Seto

The focus of this paper is on the use of the discourse particle no in Seto South Estonian, a Finnic language spoken in Southeastern Estonia and Pskov oblast in Russia. The method follows the framework of conversation analysis (Schegloff 2007), meaning that the particle is described based on its syntactic position in the clause, i.e., whether it appears clause-initally, in 2nd, intermediate, or final position, or as a stand-alone unit. In the languages that feature no, it is typically in the clause-initial or clause-internal position (Auer and Maschler 2016: 10), while other syntactic positions are less frequent. In the Uralic language family, the clause-final no it is found only in Seto, Estonian, and sporadically in Livonian, while the 2nd position use is unique to only Seto. This study is based on Seto recordings made between 2010–2016 in Pskov oblast and 2020–2023 in Southeastern Estonia. It focuses on the various forms of no in Seto with the aim of describing the distribution of no and noh, the Russian-borrowed nu and nuh, and their prosodic variants noo, nuu, nooh, nuuh in the abovementioned syntactic positions. Special attention is given to noq since the latter is homonymous with the temporal adverbial noq ‘now’ also found in Seto.