JOURNAL LINGUISTICS

Rigina Turunen

Complex Morphosyntactic Features of Nominal Predicates in

Erzya

ABSTARCT

The paper talks about the morphosyntactic features of Erzya nominal predicates, concentrating on the synthetic construction type based on predicative suffixes. Erzya nominal and locational predicates can be inflected for person, number and tense by using the predicative suffixes. The predicative suffixes are identical with the person markers of verbal conjugation except for the third person singular of the present tense and those past tense constructions in which double marking of plurality is possible.

1. INTRODUCTION

One of the interesting places in linguistic complexity to be research is about the Mordyin nominal constructions. The Mordyin languages Erzya and Moksha stand out among Uralic languages in that they exhibit an especially strong tendency to synthetism with very rich inflectional morphology. This paper consists of three parts. First, the morphosyntactic features of synthetic nominal predicate constructions are described in detail. Thenthe diachronic development of predicative suffixes is discussed, and finally, the Erzya predicative suffixes are examined in a typological context and their position on the grammaticalization scale is discussed both from formal and functional points of view.

2. THE SYNTETIC NOMINAL PREDICATE CONSTRUCTION: PREDICATIVE SUFFIXES

The most complex type of Erzya nominal predicate constructions is the synthetic one, which is based on using predicative suffixes expressing person, number and tense. The predicative suffixes are the same as those used for verbal inflection. in Erzya there is a whole paradigm with nominal predicates agreeing in tense and person with the subject. In the present tense, no trace of an auxiliary can be seen and the person marker attaches straight to the nominal stem. In contrast, the form of the past tense predicative suffix is transparent: the source of the new person and tense marker is a suffixed and reanalyzed auxiliary verb. In the past tense, besides the synthetic constructions, an analytic construction with the copula verb can also be used. Even though the same copula verb can be shown in both the synthetic and the analytic past tense constructions, the two constructions do not differ only in the degree of the fusion of their elements beside that. The synthetic and analytic construction types are in free variation in the past tense.

2.1  The Double Marking Of Plural

Sometimes a plural subject is marked twice on the nominal predicate: the plurality is expressed first by the nominal suffix -t and then by the predicative suffix. Double marking is more usual in the perfect tense of the third person plural and with some frequently used pronouns. One of the older grammars of Erzya shows a paradigm with double plural marking in all plural forms, but the newer ones do not have such examples. In Moksha this kind of double marking is basically always used in the plural past tense.

3. THE ORIGIN OF PREDICATIVE SUFFIX

Since the person markers of nominal predicates are the same as those of the verbal conjugation, a commonly accepted view about their origin is that the present tense predicative suffixes have been extended from the verbal paradigm into the nominal, as, indeed, dependent person markers have been known to evolve from other dependent person markers via extension.  Mordvin nominal predicate constructions are discussed in Stassen’s (1997) typological study of intransitive predication. Stassen states that the similarity between the nominal and verbal paradigms is due to nominal merging. The person agreement markers of nominal predicates have extended their range of usage to verbal inflection and not the other way round. A similar kind of system of nominal predicate constructions as in Mordvin is used in the neighboring Tatar (for more detail, see Turunen, to appear). Whether language contact could have played some role in the rise of the predicative suffix in Mordvin is an issue which should definitely be examined in further research in more detail.

4. THE FUNCTIONAL AND FORMAL DIMENSION OF THE PREDICATIVE SUFFIX

The functional dimension of person markers is studied within the framework of Bresnan and Mchombos’ (1987) grammatical vs. anaphorical agreement typology on which Siewierska (2004) builds. In this typology the person agreement markers and the typology of agreement are based on the co-occurrence possibilities of person markers and their controllers in the same construction. The agreement markers are divided into syntactic, ambiguous and pronominal. The syntactic agreement markers cannot occur without an overt controller and the pronominal markers cannot occur with an overt local controller in the same construction. The ambiguous markers can occur both in the presence of an overt controller in the same construction and in the absence of such a controller. The predicative suffixes of Erzya are ambiguous agreement markers: they can occur both in the presence of an overt controller, and the term anaphorical agreement for pronominal agreement with a non-local controller. Since the Erzya predicative suffixes are ambiguous, they may be involved in both grammatical and anaphoric agreement.

5. CONCLUSION

The nominal predicate constructions of Erzya display complex morphosyntactic features: they can be inflected for person, number and tense using the same suffixes as are used in the verbal conjugation. The locational predicate constructions connect nominal inflection (locative cases) to nominal conjugation (predicative suffixes). In the grammaticalization process, from the functional point of view, the predicative suffixes of Erzya display features of both pronominal and syntactic agreement markers and are, thus, ambiguous. From the formal point of view, the grammaticalization process of the present tense and the past tense predicative suffixes differs. First, the past tense suffix is an agglutinated copula which has gone through phonological reduction processes. The present tense suffix most probably extended from the verbal conjugation. The variability of the host makes the present tense predicative suffixes clitic-like: when the predicate nominal is a syntagm consisting of an adjectival modifier and a noun in nominative, the predicative suffixes may attach either to the modifier or to the noun.

COMMENT

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1.Morphosynyetic features

2.thente diachronic

3. predicative suffix

And the reader will be more understand how to use of that rule.