From verbal forms – to function words: grammaticalization in Russian and Kazakh through the prism of bilinguals’ texts

От глагольных форм – к служебным словам: грамматикализация в русском и казахском языках сквозь призму текстов билингвов
Kazkenova A. Rakhilina E.
December 2024 Springer Science and Business Media B.V.

Russian Linguistics
2024 #48 Issue 1

This paper focuses on comparing the grammaticalization of nonfinite verbal forms in Russian and Kazakh. As an example, we chose the forms of the visual perception verbs smotret’, glyadet’ and qara-; on the basis of these verbs, groups of function words with conditional, unconditional, and concessional semantics were formed in both languages. This study starts with observations of the nonstandard use of Russian adverbial participles smotrya and glyadya and nesmotrya na (to chto) ‘despite (the fact that)’ in texts written by first language (L1)-Kazakh bilinguals and included in the Russian Learner Corpus (RLC, web-corpora.net/RLC). We observed that the proportion of converbs smotrya and glyadya and other forms of these verbs in the bilinguals’ texts is radically different from the similar ratio in the Russian National Corpus (RNC, ruscorpora.ru). Starting from this observation, we reconstructed, on the basis of the RNC data, the ratio of the Russian adverbial participles smotrya and glyadya changing over time and the semantic evolution of derived function words. Turning to the authors’ native language, we discovered that it also has postpositions with conditional, unconditional, and concessional semantics, which are the results of the grammaticalization of converbs and participle formed from the verb qara-. However, despite this similarity, the process of grammaticalization in Kazakh occurred along different trajectories. This analysis confirms the nonrandom nature of deviations from the rules of Russian in bilinguals’ texts and reveals a deep connection between the grammaticalization of verb forms and the “lexical factor”, i.e., differences between the lexical systems of the two languages and, in particular, the incomplete semantic correspondence of visual perception verbs.

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School of Arts and Social Sciences, Narxoz University, Almaty, Kazakhstan
School of Linguistics, HSE University, Moscow, Russian Federation
V.V. Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation

School of Arts and Social Sciences
School of Linguistics
V.V. Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences

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