Khalkha Mongolian Research Articles

Половозрастные названия лошади в монгольских языках (с привлечением тюркского материала

Goals. The study seeks to introduce into scientific circulation and analyze in comparative and comparative historical perspectives — horse age-sex terms in modern Khalkha Mongolian, Buryat, and Kalmyk. By way of comparison, the work employs some material from Classical Mongolian to identify common terms and establish their general Mongolian character; it also attempts to reveal and describe some Turkic lexical borrowings associated with horse breeding, since Mongolic and Turkic languages had long contacted and interacted all across Central Asia. Materials and methods. The paper examines dictionaries of the languages involved, as well as field notes recorded from informants during the summer 2022 expedition to the Oka Buryats (Republic of Buryatia, Russia). The key research methods are the descriptive, comparative, and comparative historical ones; that of lexical/semantic analysis proves most instrumental in describing horse age-sex terms proper. Results. The analysis identifies some breed names of horses and related age-sex designations in Khalkha Mongolian, Buryat, and Kalmyk. The insight into collected materials concludes the horse breed and age-sex terms in modern Khalkha Mongolian, Buryat and Kalmyk are of generally Mongolic origin, and thus attest to common roots and great antiquity of the economic culture of Mongol ethnic groups. However, despite the horse breed and age-sex terms are specifically Mongolic, a number of lexemes of Turkic origin in different phonetic variants have still been traced, namely: x-Mong. Kh. Mong. азарга(н), Bur. азарга, Kalm. аҗрh ‘stallion’; Kh. Mong. жороо, Bur. жороошо, Kalm. җора ‘pacer’; Kh. Mong. агт(ан), Bur. агта, Kalm. агт ‘courser’; Kh. Mong. хүлэг, Bur. хүлэг, Kalm. күлг ‘courser, war horse’; Kh. Mong. аргамаг, Bur. аргамаг, Kalm. аргамак ‘argamak’.

A pseudo-sluicing analysis of reduced embedded questions in Chakhar Mongolian

This paper provides a detailed description of reduced embedded questions in Chakhar Mongolian and proposes to analyze them in terms of so-called pseudo-sluicing. It has been noted in the literature that the comparable construction in Khalkha Mongolian does not exhibit the so-called case-matching effect, a phenomenon in which the case of a remnant interrogative phrase matches that of its correlate in the preceding context. We show that it also holds in Chakhar Mongolian. We argue that reduced embedded questions in the language have a pseudo-sluicing structure, which straightforwardly accounts for the absence of the relevant effect. Our proposal is supported by the appearance of a copula and pronominal subjects in those reduced questions and by the fact that reduced questions can be pragmatically controlled.

Phonetic correlates to Khalkha Mongolian vowel contrasts: duration, formants and voice quality

The paper reports the results of an analysis of acoustic correlates to phonological contrasts in vowel length, quality and pharyngeal width with data from five native speakers of the Khalkh dialect. The study replicates Svantesson’s (1985) discovery of a chain-shift rotation of the round vowels in their presumed evolution from Classical Mongolian. Analysis with VoiceSauce (Shue et al. in: Proceedings of the ICPhS XVII, 1846–1849, 2009) finds that in addition to the first formant, the harmonics-to-noise ratio is a reliable indicator of the ATR versus RTR contrast that has been hypothesized to be the basis of the language’s vowel harmony.

Prosodic Studies on the Spoken Corpus of the Khalkha Mongolian Language: Age and Gender Effects on F0 and Speech Rate

There are many studies on age- and gender-dependent analyses in multiple languages. Still, the fundamental frequency (F0) and speech rate in different age and gender groups with Khalkha Mongolian have not yet been studied. In this investigation, we analyzed the speaker’s age and gender effects on F0 and speech rate based on a spontaneous speech corpus of the Khalkha dialect of the Mongolian language. We have discovered some universal aspects of these phonological phenomena and specific relevant characteristics of speech rate change depending on gender. The average speech rate of Khalkha Mongolian is 5.3 syllables per second. The male speakers spoke much quicker than the female speakers. Age and gender affect the F0 and speech rate in particular systematic ways. The F0 of the female and male speakers tended to decrease with age. Also, that elderly male speakers talk slower than elderly female speakers, while young and middle-aged male speakers tend to talk faster than female speakers of the same age.

Palatalization and tongue root harmony in Mongolian

Khalkha Mongolian exhibits Tongue Root harmony, in which vowels in a word share specification of root features, as well as vowel fronting in the environment of palatalized consonants. This paper examines the interaction of the two processesof interest because the acoustic cues for tongue root harmony and palatalization oppose one another. Vowels in tongue root harmony systems are categorized by tongue root position, which triggers changes in F1. Advanced Tongue Root (ATR)corresponds to a decreased F1 (see Starwalt, 2008), while Retracted Tongue Root (RTR), active in Mongolian, corresponds to increased F1 (Svantesson, 1985). Meanwhile, a primary cue of palatalization is raised F2. In Mongolian, palatalized consonants contrast only in RTR words. Palatalized consonants front adjacent vowels, which exhibit increased F2 and decreased F1. These adjacent vowels are therefore targets for both F1 raising attributable to RTR and F1 lowering due to palatalization. The specific correlates of such vowels have not been previously reported, however. Thus, using data from a corpus of six Khalkha Mongolian speakers recorded in a laboratory setting, this paper reports on the acoustic correlates of RTR in Mongolian vowels in the context of palatalization.

Частотность употребления показателей множественного числа существительных в калмыцком языке (в сравнении с монгольским и бурятским)

Introduction. The article deals with the frequency use of nominal plurality markers in Kalmyk with comparative insights into Khalkha Mongolian and Buryat. Goals. The study aims at clarifying how different the parameter is in the Mongolic languages (given that in all the analyzed idioms the use of the plural is considered optional) for further understanding of how alterable the latter are in contacts with other languages. Materials and methods. The research includes two stages: 1) analysis of a ‘microcorpus’ (10.115 word tokens), 2) analysis of online Kalmyk and Buryat corpora (800.000 and 2.200.000 word tokens, respectively). The work employs methods of calculation and comparative research. Results. The ‘microcorpus’ study shows that plurality markers in Kalmyk discourse are used somewhat less frequently than in Buryat (each twenty first and eighteenth lexemes, respectively). Whereas the ‘big’ corpora study shows that plurality markers in Kalmyk are used twice as frequently as in Buryat. Unfortunately, currently it is technically impossible to extract relevant data from the ‘big’ Mongolian corpus. Nevertheless, the available data prove that plurality markers both in Kalmyk and Buryat are used more frequently than in modern Mongolian. Conclusion. The paper suggests that around the 17th century or later there must have been a decrease in the use of plurality markers by Mongolian speakers (according to J. Street, in Middle Mongolian — i.e. in the 13th-16th centuries AD — plurality markers were four times as frequent). Probably, this phenomenon had not affected Kalmyk and Buryat that would be detached from genetically close surrounding to experience influence of Russian, which resulted in that these languages witnessed a ‘conservation’ of their original feature of comparatively frequent use of nominal plurality markers.

L2 Acquisition of a Complex Stress Pattern: UG-Constrained Learning Paths in Khalkha Mongolian.

This paper examines second language (L2) acquisition of stress in Khalkha Mongolian, which is one of the few Default-to-Opposite Edge stress systems of the world, and as such, demonstrates “conflicting directionality” regarding stress assignment, resulting in the leftmost edge of a word being more prominent in certain words and the rightmost edge in certain others. Given the additional fact that the language exhibits Non-finality effects, and that, unlike English, codas are not moraic, its acquisition presents unique difficulties and challenges for English-speaking learners of the language. Many of these challenges potentially lead these learners to make Universal Grammar (UG)-unconstrained (but cognitively reasonable) assumptions about how the phonology of Mongolian works, especially since the learners do not have all the Mongolian data available to them all at once. The learning scenario here, thus, provides unique opportunities to investigate whether L2 phonologies are constrained by the options made available by UG. The findings of a semi-controlled production experiment indicate that although learners do not necessarily converge on the prosodic representations employed by native speakers of the L2 (i.e., footless intonational prominence, at least for the leftmost/default edge ‘stress’), and although certain changes to the grammar are very difficult to implement, such as switching from moraic codas to non-moraic codas, the learners nevertheless demonstrate a stage-like behavior where each step exhibits the parameter settings employed by a natural language, one that is neither like the L2 nor the L1. Conversely, despite the input leading them to do so, learners do not entertain UG-unconstrained prosodic representations, such as End-Rule-Middle or End-Rule-Variable; End-Rule is set either to Right or Left, as is expected in a system constrained by the options made available by UG. We conclude that the hypothesis space for interlanguage phonologies is determined by UG.

Expressing intent, imminence and ire by attributing speech/thought in Mongolian

Abstract Quoted clauses in which an intention is declared are cross-linguistically known to develop into clauses that directly ascribe an intention to their subjects, and further into clauses that express the imminence of an event. In Khalkha Mongolian, several quotative constructions based on the quotative verb ge- have come to ascribe intention and then developed further semantic extensions: (i) The pattern -x ge-, featuring a fossilized Middle Mongol future-referring participial suffix, is used in a group of constructions that cover the semantic space between future time reference, intention (initially of the current speaker), and imminence. (ii) Quotational clauses ending in a particular tense-aspect-evidentiality suffix (including -n) and subordinated by a linking converb ge-ž/ge-ed are often systematically ambiguous between quotation and their purposive, causal and concessive extensions. Noun phrases with similar properties additionally allow for (dedicational-)benefactive and (allocational-)functive uses. (iii) The pattern -n ge-, which in other Central Mongolic varieties resembles -x ge-, conveys the speaker’s disbelief and anger about an actor’s willful deeds when used in echo questions marked by -n=AA. Based on conversational corpus data, this paper tries to provide a comprehensive picture of Khalkha Mongolian constructions in which the speaker’s awareness of the subject’s speech or thoughts is reinterpreted as attributing intentions and their derived notions.

Expressing intent, imminence and ire by attributing speech/thought in Mongolian

AbstractQuoted clauses in which an intention is declared are cross-linguistically known to develop into clauses that directly ascribe an intention to their subjects, and further into clauses that express the imminence of an event. In Khalkha Mongolian, several quotative constructions based on the quotative verbge- have come to ascribe intention and then developed further semantic extensions:(i)The pattern -x ge-, featuring a fossilized Middle Mongol future-referring participial suffix, is used in a group of constructions that cover the semantic space between future time reference, intention (initially of the current speaker), and imminence.(ii)Quotational clauses ending in a particular tense-aspect-evidentiality suffix (including -n) and subordinated by a linking converbge-ž/ge-edare often systematically ambiguous between quotation and their purposive, causal and concessive extensions. Noun phrases with similar properties additionally allow for (dedicational-)benefactive and (allocational-)functive uses.(iii)The pattern -n ge-, which in other Central Mongolic varieties resembles -x ge-, conveys the speaker’s disbelief and anger about an actor’s willful deeds when used in echo questions marked by -n=AA.Based on conversational corpus data, this paper tries to provide a comprehensive picture of Khalkha Mongolian constructions in which the speaker’s awareness of the subject’s speech or thoughts is reinterpreted as attributing intentions and their derived notions.

Assertion, presumption and presupposition

AbstractIn this paper, we analyze the clitic YUM (< ‘thing’) in Khalkha Mongolian which, in different syntactic contexts, reinforces assertiveness or expresses different shades of presumption or presupposition. The former holds for declaratives where the presence of YUM conveys the speaker’s strong subjective commitment. In question clauses, YUM is used to indicate the speaker’s subjective and often strong guess, sometimes to the point that the speaker presupposes that the proposition actually obtains. In subordinate clauses, YUM may fulfill the same function or serve as a structurally necessary nominalizer for adjectival predicates without introducing any semantic opposition. In declaratives marked as immediately perceived, YUM conveys inference via assumptive reasoning. We thus analyze YUM as a marker of subjective speaker conviction that within the Khalkha Mongolian declarative system is opposed to both simple factuality and overt evidential marking.

ТЕРМИНЫ КОРПУСНОЙ ЛИНГВИСТИКИ В ХАЛХА-МОНГОЛЬСКОМ И БУРЯТСКОМ ЯЗЫКАХ

The article provides a comparative analysis of corpus linguistics terms in the Khalkha Mongolian and Buryat languages. The author presents a brief survey of the basic Mongolian corpuses in Russia, Mongolia and the People’s Republic of China. The analysis of the Khalkha Mongolian terms has indicated insufficient assimilation of these lexical units: parallel usage of the Mongolian and borrowed words, existence of several synonymic variants of one and the same term. Analogous terms in the Buryat language are just being formed. The comparative analysis of the Buryat and Khalkha Mongolian terms has allowed the author to reveal a term-formative potential, to identify possible borrowings from the all-Mongolian terminology.

Word Frequency Effect in Lexical Decision Task: Evidence from Khalkha Mongolian

In experimental psycholinguistics, one clue into the architecture of lexical memory comes from the presence of robust frequency effects in lexical decision task (LDT), in which subjects judge whether a written stimulus is a real word or a nonword, and processing complexity is measured by reaction time (RT). For example, in LDT the visual word recognition process is facilitated (or inhibited) by word frequency as measured from the representative corpus. Our study verifies the word frequency effect in standard (“yes/no task”) LDT performed by Khalkha Mongolian subjects. The results showed strong weight of word frequency as RTs predictor (R2 = .631, F (1, 28) = 50.57, p < .000, β = .802, t = 7.111, p < .000). Our experimental results also correspond to experimental findings on word frequency effects for Japanese Katakana (syllabic) and Kanji (logographic) words in standard LDT. Such lexical decision “script moderation” could be the actual clue for further LDT experiments (e. g., relatively “deep” Mongolian script vs. “shallow” Cyrillic Mongolian)

К ТИПОЛОГИИ ЗНАЧЕНИЙ ДЕЕПРИЧАСТНЫХ ФОРМ В АГГЛЮТИНАТИВНЫХ ЯЗЫКАХ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ ЯКУТСКОГО, МОНГОЛЬСКОГО И ЭВЕНКИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКОВ)

The article deals with the adverbial participle forms of the agglutinative languages of the Altaic language family by the material of the Yakut, Khalkha Mongolian and Evenki languages. On the basis of the conducted analysis, the author seeks to identify some common typological features of the adverbial participle in agglutinative languages. In the work, the notion “adverbial participle” is specified, the need for which is dictated by discrepancy between the classical definition and the factual material of the considered languages. The adverbial participle forms are studied from the functional-semantic perspective, and the typology of their meanings is revealed.

Voice Onset Time of Word-Initial Stops and Affricates in Khalkha Mongolian

Voice Onset Time of Word-Initial Stops and Affricates in Khalkha Mongolian

“Breaking-verbalization” of Mongolian preverbs: The grammar of hitting and breaking in Khalkha Mongolian

“Breaking-verbalization” of Mongolian preverbs: The grammar of hitting and breaking in Khalkha Mongolian

Stable and unstable nasal stems in Khalkha Mongolian

Declension of nasal stem nouns differs from that of standard consonant and vowel stems. The four nasal stem types discussed in the paper are not strict categories, a wide range of nouns show variance in the use of suffixes characteristic of one or another stem type, and also several examples of semantic split can be observed. Data obtained from the internet using a search engine show the distribution of the alternating forms, the tendencies of certain changes of stem types and also prove the spreading of unstable n-stems and velar nasal stems. The most complex phenomenon among Khalkha nasal stem types is the unstable n which is not simply a lexically encoded empty morpheme or a phonological feature in the declension paradigm of a particular noun class, but it has certain grammatical functions as well.

Detachable Groups and Kinship Tensions

This paper concerns the formation of detachable political groups among the Mongols in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the process of their reattachment to larger polities within the Russian and Qing empires. It traces the case of Okin Taisha, who split off from the Abaga Mongols in present-day Inner Mongolia, became a subject of the Russians, then of a Khalkha Mongolian noble, and finally returned to Russia. The paper argues that kinship relations were a crucial means for conceptualising these attachments and detachments. Kinship should not be assumed invariably to imply solidarity, but rather also encodes division, inequality of status, and uncertainty in personal relations. The paper also aims to contribute to understanding of the internal composition of such split-away polities, which were not initially based on kinship, even though their aristocratic leaders expressed their relations with other leaders in kin terms.

Khalkha Mongolian speakers' vowel bias: L1 influences on the acquisition of non-adjacent vocalic dependencies

Native language (L1) phonology has been shown to play an important role in influencing humans' perception and production of novel speech. Yet research examining the conditions which trigger humans to calculate transitional probability between non-adjacent linguistic elements has not considered the potential influence of L1 phonology. For example, previous artificial grammar learning (AGL) literature has shown that participants acquire certain non-adjacent phonological dependencies only with difficulty. However, this previous research used only speakers of English or French, languages which do not exhibit such dependencies. This paper investigates how L1 phonology influences participants' acquisition of non-adjacent phonological dependencies in an AGL task. Five experiments were conducted with speakers of Khalkha Mongolian, a language which exhibits a non-adjacent dependency, vowel harmony and with speakers of American English, a language which exhibits no such dependencies. Khalkha Mongolian speakers successfully acquired non-adjacent vocalic dependencies while American English speakers failed to do so under identical statistical conditions. Besides providing further evidence that statistical learning is not limited to the acquisition of adjacent dependencies, these findings suggest that L1 phonology plays an important role in biasing speakers' attention towards certain aspects of language.

Some remarks on Modern Korean loan words in Modern Khalkha Mongolian

Some remarks on Modern Korean loan words in Modern Khalkha Mongolian

The Past Tenses of the Mongolian Verb: Meaning and Use by Robert L. Binnick (review)

Reviewed by: The Past Tenses of the Mongolian Verb: Meaning and Use by Robert L. Binnick György Kara The Past Tenses of the Mongolian Verb: Meaning and Use. Robert L. Binnick. Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory 1. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Pp. xxii + 236. $129.00 (hardcover). This is the first volume of a new Brill series, “Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory,” edited by Brian D. Joseph of Ohio State University and his international team. The editors “expect that each volume will advance our knowledge of how human language works through solid theoretically sophisticated description and through empirical testing of theoretical constructs and claims” (p. ix). The Mongolic languages of the past and present show a considerable variety of devices to indicate the relation of an event or state to time, and the speaker’s or writer’s judgment on the nature of this relation. The system of Modern Khalkha Mongolian was first described and analyzed by G. J. Ramstedt in his classic Über die Konjugation des Khalkha-Mongolischen (1903). For him, aspect (perfect, or imperfect) was the primary; tense (present, past, future) was the secondary organizing principle of the indicative finite forms, but, aware of the fact that these forms do not represent objective Zeitstufen ‘strata of time’ (time imagined as a vertical dimension), he also recognized the importance of a “certain freedom of the speaker to choose amongst the available means” (Binnick’s translation, p. 20). After a thorough introduction to the Mongolian devices for marking past events (part 1), there follows a description of their use and interpretation in the spoken and written languages (parts 2 and 3); on the basis of this description, a pragmatic theory is developed, elucidating the discourse function of the “tenses” (part 4). The author surveyed grammars, textbooks and phrasebooks, various original Mongolian texts, Mongolian translations of English, Russian and Chinese works, and printed and electronic sources; he also consulted native speakers. His monograph offers a critique and synthesis of earlier views, and examines and clarifies a wide range of details, among them the opposition of evidentiality (–lAA) vs. inferentiality (–ǰee) and the hitherto less investigated mirativity. He achieves a new vision of the system in which evidentiality is combined with proximality, as opposed to distality of the other, inferential, forms, and where anaphoric and definite forms are opposed to deictic and indefinite ones (“Deictic tenses are indefinite, since they neither require nor point to a certain time”[p. 216].) He finds that the “inferential ending ... is also mirative” and that the anaphoric tenses are typical in diegetic genres (fiction and autobiography) and that the deictic tenses are typical in nondiegetic genres (journalism, reference works, and other nonfiction). It is certain that “the present work has raised many more questions than it has answered” and “has pointed the way towards future research” (p. 220). Here I offer some suggestions and corrections. To the works consulted, I would add a number of old and new books, for instance, Alimaa (2003); Bittigau (2003); Bobrovnikov (1849); Enhebatu (1988); Mönx-Amgalan (1998); Sechenbaatar (2003) (who discusses Chahar durative –n(aa), terminative –w(aa), resultative –ǰ/č(ää), and confirmative –laa, etc. [p. 137]); Sanžeev (1934, especially pp. 31–43), even though many of the examples written in the Latin orthography of the time reek of Stalinism; Todaeva (1951); as well as some Buriat grammars. (See also Skribnik and Seesing 2012.) In note 1, the author writes that “in the vertical-script language, case (and some other) affixes are generally (though not in all contexts) written as separate words from their stems, so that nom.un, for example, is actually written as nom un. A hyphen is conventionally used (as in nom–un) to indicate the connection between the two” (p. xvii). In fact, the hyphen is used to indicate that there is no initial aleph at the beginning of the [End Page 101] separately written genitive suffix in the Aramaic-based writing system of Uyghur-Mongolian, i.e., nom–un is written as nwm wn, thus not in two words, but in two sequences. Compare also the vocative particle a written as a compound of initial and final allographs of aleph, while the dative-locative...