Person and number agreement in Bashkir independent verbal clauses

Say S. S. Lichno-chislovoye soglasovaniye nezavisimykhglagolnykh skazuyemykh v bashkirskom yazyke. Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. 308.

Agreement in independent verbal predicates in Bashkir shows at least two patterns of variation. First, for each person-number combination in the 1st and 2nd person, there are two variants of agreement affixes: a “long” and a “short” one. Second, under some specific circumstances, agreement affixes are attached to the main verb rather than to the auxiliary component, which is the default locus of agreement in analytic constructions. I analyzed these variation patterns based on elicited data as well as data from a small oral corpus and arrived at the following conclusions. 1) The choice of “short” agreement affixes correlates with later stages in grammaticalization of finiteness, in particular, it is more typical of those synthetic verb forms that have more verbal and less nominal properties, of those speech registers that are more innovative, etc. 2) Analytic constructions that historically involve forms of i- ‘to be’ tend to grammaticalize toward TAM-suffixes (this is typical of ine <be.pst> и ihä <be.cond>) or an evidential/mirative particle (ikän <be.pc.pst>).