Functioning of the verb’s reflexive voice in the modern Udmurt language

Abstract

Introduction. Any language’s verb system has many resources for denoting various actions of people. The relations of the action or state of the subject to its object are determined by the grammatical category of the voice, represented in the Udmurt language by the pairs of causative – non-causative, reflexive – non-reflexive forms of voices. The article considers the functioning of the verb’s reflexive voice in the modern Udmurt language, including the etymology of the voice’s affix, the grammatical meanings of reflexive verbs. Materials and Methods. The main material of the research is based on the Udmurt-Russian Dictionary (2008) and the texts of Udmurt writers included into the National Corpus of the Udmurt Language. The article used a set of such research methods as descriptive, continuous sampling, contextual analysis, taking into account the situational conditioning of the verb voice. On specific examples, the use of these methods makes it possible to consider the structure, dynamics and features of the functioning of the reflexive voice of the verb in the Udmurt language. Results and Discussion. As a result of the research, for the first time, among the reflexive voice’s groups we include verbs of passive voice. The reason of it is the low probability of using passive constructions in colloquial speech. The frequent cases of using passive meanings of verbs in the literature and in the press are defined by the calcified translation of foreign-language constructions. Conclusion. The grammatical structure of the Udmurt language is represented by two binary voice’s forms: reflexive/non-reflexive voice and causative/non-causative voice. Specific indicators of reflexive voice are affixes -ськ(ы)-/-ск(ы), -иськ(ы)-/-üськ(ы)-. From the point of view of semantic content, five semantic groups of returnable pledges are distinguished: reflexive, medial, reciprocal, impersonal, passive. The proposed classification is determined by the specifics of the relations between the subject and the object of action.