Nominal temporal adverbials of simultaneous location in Mordvin and Mari based on the data from the New Testament

DOI:10.30842/alp23065737193234284

Pleshak P. S. Markirovaniye temporalnykh imennykh grupp s semantikoy sinkhronnoy lokalizatsii v mordovskikh i mariyskikh yazykakh na materiale Novogo Zaveta. Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. 234–284.

This paper deals with NP-based temporal adverbials of simultaneous location (that day, next year) in four closely related Finno-Ugric languages: two Mordvin (Erzya and Moksha), and two Mari (Meadow Mari and Hill Mari). The research is based on data from the New Testament translations. Alongside with the basic strategies of the morphological marking of NP-based temporal adverbials with different semantic subtypes distinguished by Haspelmath (“Hour”, “Day part”, “Day”, “Month”, “Season” and “Year”), I look at “Abstract time” which can have marking not identical to any other category. I also investigate the influence of presence of a nominal modifier (ordinal numeral, adjective, demonstrative pronoun, genitive dependent) on the choice of the marker. In addition, I discuss the status of unmarked forms, as well as adverbial affixes and the genitive case in the system of morphosyntactic encoding of temporal expressions. I show that unmarked NP-based temporal adverbials and temporal NPs marked with so-called adverbial affixes should not be treated as frozen lexical forms, because such expressions can contain adnominal modifiers. Based on the compatibility of some temporal markers with plural markers, I also argue that adverbial affixes that are homophonous with the genitive affixes in Moksha and Hill Mari are in fact genitive. This means that in these languages not only spatial cases, but also the genitive has temporal functions, even though it has not been discussed or sometimes even reflected in reference grammars. I argue that, despite some restrictions of the corpus of the New Testament, such a preliminary study of the system of temporal expressions in a particular language can be the first step within a larger research project, which helps to formulate hypotheses that can be later falsified by elicited examples. This method also helps to verify and complement the information found in reference grammars and dictionaries.

Keywords

temporal expressions, case marking, adnominal modifiers, genitive, parallel corpus, Mordvin, Mari

About the author

Pleshak Polina͏ S.

University of Maryland, College Park (Maryland, USA)

ppleshak@umd.edu

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Keywords

temporal expressions, case marking, adnominal modifiers, genitive, parallel corpus, Mordvin, Mari