| Summary: | Introduction. The paper deals with different conditional constructions in Buryat
and Kalmyk. Traditionally, the main way to express the conditional meaning in Mongolic
languages is a non-finite clause with a converb (there are the conditional form on -bal in
Buryat and Khalkha and new marker -xla in Kalmyk). Alongside with it, there are some new
conditional constructions with connectives, with conjunction-like markers herbee in Buryat
and Khalkha and kemər in Kalmyk co-occurring with a form of conditional converb. The
language contact approach presupposes that connectives as well as a structural pattern with a
conjunction are frequently borrowed from dominant languages. Thus, the research question
of the paper is how to explain the new conditional construction. Results. In particular, the
paper discusses the distribution of different types of conditional construction according to the
data from Buryat and Kalmyk corpora. It suggests that conjunction-like markers herbee ‘if’ in
Buryat and kemər ‘if’ in Kalmyk may be viewed as grammatical interference from Russian.
Nevertheless, the form of conditional converb gixlä developing to a connective in Kalmyk is grammaticalized among other forms of the verb gi- ‘say’ and its grammaticalization of a verb
of saying to marker of a conditional clause is frequent cross-linguistically.
|
|---|