Kalmyk: a typological overview
Institute of Linguistic Studies, Saint-Petersburg
Kalmyk is a Mongolic language spoken in Kalmykia, a semi-desert region to the Northwest of the Caspian sea. In the 17th century, the ancestors of Kalmyk migrated to Kalmykia from Dzungaria (the northern part of Xinjiang, the westernmost region in the present-day China), but preserved most linguistic and cultural traits of Oirats (e.g. Buddhism). In my four lectures, I am going to cover the following topics.
1) Genealogical and typological profile of the Kalmyk language, its position relative to other “Altaic” languages, as well as sociolinguistic situation. I will also briefly cover its phonology and word structure.
2) Nominal categories and noun phrases. I will pay special attention to some oddities in possessive morphology, and will argue that they are accounted for by syntactic patterns.
3) Verbs and simple clauses, with focus on such phenomena as insubordination (the use of originally non-finite forms as independent predicates), complex verbs, egophoricity and (the highly asymmetrical) negation.
4) Clause combining. Apart from syntactic patterns sensu stricto, I will discuss some preferences in discourse organization and the ways in which these patterns affect the use of valency-changing operations.
Links to the video recordings: