Timofey Arkhangelskiy ([email protected]) Universität Hamburg / Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

Maria Usacheva ([email protected]) Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences

Udmurt postpositions and Turkic influence

Udmurt is a Uralic language that has been in contact with neighboring Tatar and Bashkir (Kipchak Turkic) for at least 500 years (Agyagási 2012); Tatar was dominant in the region before the advent of Russian. In this talk, we are going to present data on Udmurt postpositions. At first glance, there are a lot of non-trivial similarities between Udmurt and Turkic in this respect. However, a closer look at the areal distribution of postpositional constructions shows that Udmurt varieties that have been in closer contact with Turkic paradoxically show less similarity. The research is based on Udmurt corpora and text collections (corpus of standard Udmurt; corpus of Udmurt-language social media; collection of scanned newspapers of the first half of the 20th century) and on our own field data (Beserman dialect: spoken corpus and elicitation). There are two main types of noun phrases with dependents in Udmurt: direct juxtaposition, analyzed as compounding by Fejes (2005), and the double-marked possessive construction (N-GEN N-P.3). These constructions, sometimes called “ezafe-1” and “ezafe-3”, are also available in Turkic languages. To the best of our knowledge, there is no “ezafe-2” (N.NOM N-P.3) in any Udmurt dialect. The examples can be seen in (1). (1a) pukon pi̮d-jos (1b) pukon-len pi̮d-jos-i̮z chair leg-PL chair-GEN leg-PL-P.3SG ‘chair legs’ Most of the items traditionally labeled as postpositions in Udmurt are of nominal origin and can be inflected for case, e.g. vi̮l-i̮n top-LOC ‘on top’, vi̮l-i̮ś top-EL ‘from the top’, vi̮l-oź top-TERM ‘up to the top’, etc.; they will be further referred to as relational nouns. All Turkic languages have similar sets of items, called “secondary postpositions”, “quasi-postpositions”, etc. (Libert 2008). In standard Udmurt, they normally govern the nominative case of their dependents, both nominal and pronominal; it has even been claimed by Libert (2008:250) that nominative is the only adpositional case in Udmurt. However, there are in fact other possibilities, whose grammaticality varies depending on the dialect and particular relational noun. This is especially true for pronominal dependents. In (2), you can see examples of three types of constructions attested in Udmurt: (2a) mon dor-e (2b) mi̮nam dor-a-m (2c) mon dor-a-m I.NOM near-ILL I.GEN near-ILL-P.1SG I.NOM near-ILL-P.1SG ‘to me’ (2a) is available in all Udmurt varieties and is prescribed by most contemporary grammars. (2b) and (2c) are or used to be available only in certain dialects. The interesting thing about (2b) is that this is exactly how Turkic languages usually handle relational nouns. In Turkic, including Tatar (Lyutikova 2017) and Bashkir (Poppe 1964:86), relational nouns take nominal dependents in the nominative, while personal pronouns (except 3PL) are used just like in (2b). (2c) is listed as a possible option by Winkler (2011:135), but it is obviously marginal nowadays. In the social media corpus, it is encountered mostly in songs and poems (32 out of 45 occurrences). Historical data and the social media corpus suggest that it was more popular a century ago and was mostly used in Eastern Udmurtia. In the Beserman dialect (NW Udmurtia), (2b) is more frequent for 1st and 2nd person pronouns and available (although infrequent) for the 3rd person pronoun (Table 1). PRO.12.NOM PRO.12.GEN PRO.3.NOM PRO.3.GEN N.NOM N.GEN dor ‘near’ 2 9 44 1 378 0 və̑ l ‘top’ 0 6 19 1 554 0 Table 1. Frequencies of dependents for two relational nouns based on Beserman corpus Historical data shows that (2b) was widespread in Northern and Eastern Udmurtia in the first half of the 20th century, but was rare in other parts. In the contemporary written corpora, it is occasionally attested in informal register in various parts of Udmurtia, however it is two orders of magnitude less frequent than (2a). Based on our data, we claim that the grammaticalization path that makes a relational noun out of an ordinary one looks like this in Udmurt: (i) it starts accepting specific and definite nominative dependents -> (ii) it starts accepting pronominal and possessive-marked nominal dependents -> (iii) its ability to take genitive dependents (“ezafe-3”) gradually decreases and vanishes. Apparently, the step (iii) may be inhibited for pronominal dependents, which would lead to a Beserman-like (and Turkic-like) situation. What is striking in all this is that it is inhibited predominantly in the areas that have little or no immediate contact with Tatar or Bashkir, i.e. North, Center and East. Moreover, this genitive/nominative split seems to be widespread in Komi languages, which are closely related to Udmurt, but have no direct contact with Turkic. By contrast, (iii) seems to work faster for Southern Udmurt varieties, including those spoken in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, which have been influenced by Turkic languages much more heavily. The newspaper Aźlańe (Tatarstan) has 61:1 NOM:GEN ratio for personal pronouns; Ošmes (Bashkortostan), 341:2. (Both newspapers show signs of Turkic influence in other respects.) Historical data found in Southern newspapers shows similar picture. The observed situation is paradoxical. On the one hand, general similarities of Udmurt and Turkic NP and postpositional systems, given the history of their contact, strongly suggest that developments in Udmurt were influenced or reinforced by Turkic languages. On the other hand, it turns out that in the geographical areas with most Turkic influence, less structural similarity is found than in those with little or no direct influence. We do not have any explanation for this. Meanwhile, (2c) seems to be dispreferred in Turkic-influenced areas, which is quite expected.

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