Articles

On meanings of the reciprocal suffix -š- in Balkar

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Abstract

The paper is based on evidence collected from Balkar speakers during the authors’ field trips to Verkhnyaya Balkariya village, Kabardino-Balkarian Republic in August of 2021. The study addresses semantics of the suffix -š- in Balkar. This marker has three basic meanings: reciprocal, sociative, and competitive. Reciprocal denotes simultaneous mutual action by two or more participants, each (or most) performing more than one semantic role. Sociative describes collective or distributive plural actions. Competitive interpretations refer to situations when two or more people are trying to surpass each other in some activity. All of the basic meanings can be confined to verbal plurality. The suffix also manifests some scalar properties. For each of the basic meanings we reveal certain restrictions on the semantic class of the base verb. Apart from that, a range of additional meanings sometimes manifest in -š-derivates: durative, iterative, and excessive plurality.

Keywords: Karachay-Balkar, Turkic languages, reciprocal, sociative, competitive, valency-changing operations, scalarity

How to Cite:

Paramonova, D., (2023) “On meanings of the reciprocal suffix -š- in Balkar”, Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic 7, 24 - 31. doi: https://doi.org/10.3765/ptu.v7i1.5322

Rights: Anastasija Gruzdeva, Daria Paramonova