LEXICAL BORROWINGS FROM RUSSIAN, AND THE SUBCATEGORIZATION FRAME IN EVENKI

This paper focuses on the use of the Russian predicative nado in Evenki, in particular, in two corpora of oral stories in Evenki recorded in 1930–2014. This predicative is generally considered as a lexical borrowing, written as нāда/ нāдэ/ нада and spelled asnāda/nādә in the literary Evenki. In the oral stories, it is usually spelled asnada/ nado. Necessity is encoded in Evenki in specialized particles, in particular, the impersonal debitive particle with the -vkĀ/-pkĀ affix (ptcp.impdeb). Both the participial construction and the construction with nāda/nādә co-exist in the corpus, and whereas the use of the participial construction gets reduced, the construction with nada/ nado is often used instead of the original participial construction, being synonymous. The issue of whethernāda/nādә or nada/ nado must be regarded as a real borrowing, or it is an instance of code-switching is thoroughly studied. For this purpose, we use the data of the subcategorization frame of nado in Russian, and the way as to how nado’s subcategorization frame adapts to the Evenki grammar. In particular, nado in Russian subcategorizes for an infinitive clause, which lacks in Evenki. We consider in detail the variation in the realization of the argument that corresponds to the Russian infinitive. We arrive at the conclusion that the non-finite feature of an infinitive clause (as of nada/ nado’s sentential complement) is borrowed, so that several morphological types of non-finite clauses are allowed. An important issue is touched, as to how the subcategorization frame of a predicate can be realized in case of code-switching vs. in case of the predicate’s borrowing, and how/ to what extent the subcategorization frame of a predicate can vary in case of its borrowing.