• 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

Particles in Khalkha, Buryat, and Kalmyk

According to Janhunen (2012: 256) ‘particle’ is an umbrella term for several types of invariable elements which function as modifiers at either the phrasal or the clausal level. Additionally, in Khalkha, Buryat, and Kalmyk there is a group of particles participating in clause combining as connectors, mostly of conditional and concessive semantics.

Particles can be either independent words (free morphemes) or enclitic elements (bound morphemes). In contrast to Buryat and Kalmyk, enclitic particles in Khalkha are written as separate graphic words.

Particles modifying noun phrases include superlative, comparative particles like Bur. egee haruul ‘brightest’, sahan šengi sagaan ‘white as snow’, Kh. cas šig cagaan etc.; intensifying particles like Bur. le (-l after a word-final vowel) ‘exactly’ or šye ‘even’ (both focus-sensitive), cf. xüšerxen le ažal ‘such a difficult work’, ene-l ‘exactly this’, barastai-šye barilda- ‘fight even with a leopard’; and many others.

Particles at the clausal level are elements modifying the content or specifying the clause structure (Janhunen 2012: 257). This group includes:

• topic particles (marking predominantly subjects) like Bur. bolbol (written language), xadaa: Xün bolbol uxaatai amitan ‘Man is a thinking creature’;
• question particles like Bur. be (special questions), gü (general questions), aal (emphatic rhetorical questions): Agaar-haa ünetei yüümen bii yüm aal? ‘Is there anything more precious than air?’;
• negation particles (see Negation);
• discourse particles and epistemic modal particles like Bur. confirmative emphatic daa, assertive yüm, hypothetical xa etc.; they are highly combinable (up to four particles in one predicate). In Buryat some of them can take over the person marking, cf.:

Particles in clause combining are mostly petrified non-finite forms of the obsolete auxiliary *a- ‘be’, coming back to old periphrastic forms of dependent predicates, e.g. the causal-conditional particle aad ‘but’ (cv.prf < *a-xad), haa ‘if’ (cv.cond < *a-xasa), and xada (pc.fut < *a-ku-du). That is the reason why these particles take possessive affixes as personal markers (Sanžeev 1963: 76-78). They are also known as conjunctional particles or often termed ‘conjunctions’ in traditional grammars.

The clauses with the conjunctional particles have the subject in the genitive (2), except the clauses with the particle aad which have the subject in nominative - similar to clauses with its etymological source, the perfective converb in -AAd.