SEARCHING FOR CONTACTS BETWEEN CLOSELY RELATED LANGUAGES: A VERBAL MARKER OF ASSOCIATED MOTION IN GORIN NANAI

The paper aims at revealing the outcomes of language contact in Gorin Nanai. Gorin Nanai is a dialect that has been developed as a result of language shift: Samagir population which used to speak a Northern Tungusic language shifted to Nanai. We focused on constructions with the marker -ndə expressing associated motion (motion-cum-purpose). The research is based on the corpus data of the Gorin Nanai texts collected by A. Putintseva in 1935–1936. We investigated the following parameters of the associated motion constructions: frequency, the use in different syntactic constructions (either pleonastic constructions with an expressed motion verb or independent uses without a motion verb), argument structure and deictic interpretation. The Gorin data were compared with the data of Najkhin Nanai and Ulcha, on the one hand, and the data of the Northern Tungusic languages (mainly Evenki and Negidal), on the other hand. The deictic interpretation of Gorin Nanai verbs with the associated motion marker is close to that observed for Najkhin Nanai (a relatively high proportion of the ventive uses) and far from that of the Northern Tungusic languages. The high proportion of pleonastic echo-constructions in Gorin Nanai brings it closer to the Northern Tungusic languages. Finally, other parameters turned out to be irrelevant for the analysis, as they do not reveal any genetic or areal clusters of languages or dialects. Therefore, the frequency characteristics of the associated motion constructions in Gorin Nanai partially refl ect the influence of the Northern Tungusic substratum.