The syntactic positions and form variation of no/noh in Seto

The focus of this paper is on the discourse particle no in Seto South Estonian, a Finnic language spoken in Southeastern Estonia and in Pskov Oblast in Russia. The aim is to give an overview of the particle variants that make up the no particle family in Seto: the main variants no and noh, their prosodic variants noo and nooh, the Slavic-stemmed nu, nuh, and nuuh, and the unique South Estonian noq which is homonymous with the temporal adverb noq ‘now’. The focal point is on describing the syntactic distribution of the particle variants, i.e. their positions in the clause. In the languages that feature no, it is typically in the clause-initial or clause-internal position (Auer & Maschler 2016: 10),  while other syntactic positions are less frequent. In Seto, no appears in the initial, 2nd (or post-initial), intermediate, and final position of the clause. In the Uralic language family, the clause-final no it is found only in Seto, Estonian, and sporadically in Livonian, while the second-position use is unique to only Seto. This study is based on Seto recordings made in 2010–2016 in Pskov Oblast and in 2020–2023 in Southeastern Estonia.