Адаптация глагольных заимствований в монгольских языках
Adaptation of verbal borrowings in Mongolic

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with different strategies of loan verb adaptation in different Mongolic languages, trying to bridge the gap between individual descriptions of grammatical loanword adaptation in particular Mongolic languages and general typologies of verbal borrowings (such as [Wohlgemuth 2009]). The Mongolic data allows to trace contacts with languages belonging to different structural types covering a huge territory with possible contact micro-areas. The receiving Mongolic languages are agglutinating and almost exclusively suffixing, while their donors include languages with similar properties (Turkic varieties), with inflectional morphology (Russian), and with strong isolating tendencies (Chinese, English). Accordingly, the patterns of adaptation might differ according to the properties of the donor language. There are three adaptation strategies in Mongolic languages: indirect insertion (with derivational affixes adapting loanwords), a light verb strategy, and direct insertion. The direct insertion pattern is less common, while indirect insertion and the light verb strategy are equally frequent. Most Mongolic varieties use only two strategies, but some Inner Mongolian dialects allow for all three patterns. One adaptation strategy may employ different markers: for example, in Khalkha, a variety of affixes facilitate indirect assertion, and in some Buryat dialects, the light verb bol- ‘become’ is used alongside the more widely attested ke- ‘do’ for adapting borrowed verbs. Variation in a particular language is thus due to the combination of different adaptation strategies and the presence of more than one marker inside one pattern. The paper discusses the distribution of adaptation strategies within a variety according to donor language or other factors. It suggests that adaptation strategies may be viewed as areal features for Mongolic and other languages, though their precise areal distribution requires further study. The paper discusses the borrow ability of nouns and verbs. The well-known typological approach presupposes that nouns are borrowed more frequently and easily than verbs. Nevertheless, data from different Mongolic varieties shows that loanwords are sometimes treated as nouns in that a verbalizer is even added to verbal roots. Thus, it becomes less clear how relevant word class in the donor language is for the borrow ability of a given word, especially if there are no morphological clues to word class, as in Chinese.

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