Uldanay Jumabay (Goethe University Frankfurt/Main)

Clause combining strategies in Kazakh as spoken in China in comparative perspectives

An excerpt from the daily life of Kazakh nomads. Photo: Uldanay Jumabay.

Kazakh, one of the official languages of Kazakhstan, belongs to the Kipchak or North-western branch of the Turkic languages. Kazakh is closely related to other South Kipchak languages such as Kirghiz, Noghay, Karakalpak, and Kipchak Uzbek. Over ten million speakers of Kazakh live in the Republic of Kazakhstan, in north-western China (Xinjiang), and Mongolia.

Turkic languages share a number of typological properties, e.g., their basic word order is typically Subject-Object-Verb. Typical Turkic syntax is left-branching, i.e., head-final. Embedded clauses are based on non-finite verbs such as action nominals, participant nominals, and converbs. The non-finite verbal morphology functions as bound subjunctors, marking the clauses as embedded. These bound junctors correspond in English to free subjunctors, relative pronouns, and adverbs. The planned project aims at describing some selected syntactic properties of Kazakh as spoken in China. Specifically, how are the typical Turkic features represented in Kazakh clause combining strategies and what are the language specific features in Kazakh compared to other Turkic languages as, for instance, Turkish? Kazakh syntax has been studied less than Turkish, thus, a comparative analysis will lead to new insights. Special attention will be paid to the analysis of the morphological and semantic-functional properties of the bound junctors.