Negation
Janhunen (2012: 250) differentiates three types of negation: existential, equative, and verbal.
Existential negation is expressed by the negation predicate Kh. ügüj / Bur. ügy / Kalm. uga ‘absent, is not’; it can take personal marking, e.g., Buryat Xool xünehe ügy-bdi ‘We don’t have any food’ (lit. food don’t exist-1pl), and nominal suffixes like cases, e.g., with the dative (-d) in Kalmyk noxa uga-d haxa xuc-dg ‘When a dog is absent, a pig barks’.
Equative negation comprises negation of nominal clauses by means of the negative particle biš/beše ‘not the one’ (> selective pronoun biš ‘other’), e.g., in Buryat Bi xaan beše-b ‘I am not the khan’.
Verbal negation comprises negation of both finite and non-finite verbal forms. Here we have:
- preverbal negative particles es and ülü, originally used with indicative and nominalized verbal forms. In Khalkha, es (used with finite forms in imperfective/non-past form) and ül (used with the past/perfective forms) are considered archaic or bookish (Janhunen, 2012: 251, Brosig 2015: 71). In Kalmyk, the negative marker ülü used with non-past forms disappeared in the 19th century completely (Baranova 2018, to appear). The marker es negates mostly non-finite verbal forms but also finite ones in the past contexts demonstrating a symmetric negation. In Buryat, they are obsolete.
- postverbal ügy/uga is used with finite and non-finite verbal forms (mostly with participles and a number of converbial forms). In Kalmyk, uga can not negate the past participle, which is replaced by a combination ‘perfective converb in -Ad + uga’ (asymmetric negation).
- negation suffixes, developed from postverbal negative particles; Buryat has two, -güi- ‘not’ and -düi- ‘still not’: uragša yaba-ba-güi ‘(He) did not go forward’; Üür saig-aa-düi ‘It’s not the dawn yet’ (lit. the dawn did not whiten yet). They are used with both finite and non-finite forms; note that the past participle in -hAn in Buryat is not combinable with the suffixal negation, as its negative counterpart the present participle is used: -hAn vs. -AA-güi.
- prohibitive particle Kh. büü, B. büü and Kh. bitgij/Kl. bičä ‘do not!’ used with all imperative forms.
There are adverbial constructions that do not allow negation, constructions, which are used only with negation, and constructions with free negation, which can be used with several negative markers. In Kalmyk, the three negative markers - uga, es, and biš - participate in information structuring.