ИСТИНА

In this paper we address issues surrounding the form-meaning relationship as instantiated in the methodology of field linguistics. The goal of this study is two-fold. First, we want to argue that, despite a few run-of-the-mill examples found in textbooks on field linguistics, morphological patterns of underrepresented languages provide us with excessive evidence that a certain class of semantic generalizations (broadly conceived) can only be properly identified through their formal manifestation and not the other way around. Secondly, we present the results of two case studies that support this argument. One comes from the morphological encoding of event structure, the other concerns a proper representation of the case subsystem of a nominal inflection. Data for the study have been accumulated in the fieldwork on Tundra Nenets (Uralic) and Buriat (Altaic).