• INTRODUCTION
  • About the project
  • Participating researchers
• ENCYCLOPEDIC SECTION
  • Mongolic languages
  • Khalkha
  • Buryat
  • Kalmyk
  • Useful links
• LINGUISTIC SECTION
  • Adverbial Corpus
  • Concordance
  • Transliteration
  • Grammar Notes
  • Noun
  • Verb
  • Negation
  • Particles
  • Differential object and subject marking
  • Mirativity
  • Bibliography
  • Downloads

Converbs

Converbs are defined as non-finite verbal forms that express the circumstantial (modal, causal, conditional, or temporal-aspectual) relationship of an action to another action (Janhunen 2003: 25). The term ‘converb’ was first introduced by German linguist Ramstedt in his study of the Khalkha-Mongolian verbs within the Altaistic tradition (Ramstedt 1903: 55); and established later in the linguistic typology by Nedjalkov and Nedjalkov (1987) and Haspelmath and König (1995). In other English-speaking traditions they are also termed as gerunds, adverbial participles, etc.

The Mongolic languages are rich in converbial suffixes, up to 24 or even more (cf. Janhunen 2003: 25 for a diachronic overview). Many of them are rare or dialectally restricted. Based on their syntactic and morphological characteristics, all converbs are divided in two groups: “coordinating” and “subordinating” (adverbial).

Mongolian coordinating converbs – the modal ‘by way of’, the imperfective ‘at the same time as’, and the perfective ‘after’ – are most frequent in all three languages, morphologically and etymologically opaque, and they do not take possessive markers. They are widely used in combination with a large number of auxiliary verbs, building analytic constructions with various temporal, modal, aspectual, directional, etc. meanings. Finally, the textual function of coordinating converbs is to build a narrative unit. Within such a narrative unit, the single events are chain-linked by means of coordinating converbs, so that the information focus falls on the final/finite main predicate. How these single events are linked semantically is underspecified. In the typological approaches (Nedjalkov 1995, Bisang 1998), functionally similar forms are called “narrative converbs”, not expressing special temporal semantics; instead their function is to express “sequence of events”.
Additionally to these three forms, there is in all three languages a special converbial form -ngüi or -lgüi/-lgo, that occurs in coordinating constructions, in which the first event is negated. Therefore, we classify -lgüi/-lgo after Nadeljaev (1987:33) and Kas’janenko (2002:81) as an independent negative converb.
The subjects of the clauses with coordinating converbs are always in nominative case form. They are mostly used in same-subject constructions.

The subordinating converbs, as opposed to coordinating converbs, are semantically specified and express various concrete adverbial relations (temporal, conditional, comparative, concessive, purposive). They are mostly morphologically and etymologically transparent (e.g., participles and case affixes are still recognizable) and most of them can take possessive affixes as personal markers. Janhunen (2003:26) introduced a new term ‘quasiconverb’ to refer to those controversial forms that can still be analyzed morphologically as participle in a certain case (e.g., the converb -xAAr in Khalkha can be analyzed as a future participle -x in the instrumental case -AAr.) In contrast to coordinating converbs, they – except the purposive converbs – do not build analytic constructions with auxiliary verbs and can also be used in different-subject constructions. The subjects in the clauses with the subordinating converbs can bear different case forms such as nominative, genitive, and even accusative (see Differential Subject Marking).

The number of converbs differs in all three languages.

Table: Overview of converbs in Khalkha, Buryat, and Kalmyk