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ON SOCIOLINGUISTIC FEATURES OF TELEUT LANGUAGE (BASED ON 2013–2014 FIELD STUDIES) // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2014. Issue 4 (6). P. 35-42

The article characterizes the current state of the Teleut language, which belongs to the minority Turkic languages of Siberia. An analysis of the position of the Teleut language in existing classifications of Turkic languages is given. Fieldtrip linguistic data on Teleut collected by the authors in 2013–2014 allow to make certain conclusions about the extent of language preservation within different age groups as well as the main language use spheres. There is a significant influence of the Russian language expressing in a large number of loanwords displacing native Turkic words. Also the syntactic rules of Teleut are often being neglected as a result of Russian language impact. “The Teleut language” at the moment is a conditional term for the language of the indigenous Turkic population of Belovo district in Kemerovo region, South Siberia, Russia. In common Turkic languages classifications it is often referred to as a southern dialect of the Altai language. However, there are prerequisites to consider it as a separate language. Despite the genetic links Teleut language has with other Southern Altai dialects, forming together a national literary Altai language, Teleut has a clearly defined geographical location, which does not border on the Altai language area. It is also spoken by a separate and united ethnolinguistic community and has a separate writing and orthography, different from Altai literary language, which is of course still disputable since there are no stable literary rules for modern written Teleut. This allows us to consider the existence of a linguistic cluster comprising Altai and Teleut languages. However this thesis requires more empirical Teleut fieldtrip material with the subsequent analysis of all levels of the language system. Currently Teleut is strongly influenced by Russian, mainly its lexicon and also simple, complex and compound sentence syntax. It’s typical for Russian loanwords in Teleut to undergo morphological and phonological adaptations in accordance with the rules of Teleut language. Syntactically Teleut sentences tend to follow the SVO pattern instead of placing the finite predicate in the absolute end of clause. Complex and compound sentences have become excessively rich in Russian loan conjunctions which are broadly used in favor of traditional Teleut postpositions normally linking the clauses in Turkic languages. These changes underscore the urgent need for documentation and further analysis of the Teleut language.

Keywords: Teleut language, Turkic languages of Siberia, idioms, language cluster, language bilateral influence, borrowing, the “language or dialect” problem

POSSESSIVE NOUN CONSTRUCTIONS IN TELEUT AND CHULYM-TURKIC // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2015. Issue 4 (10). P. 24-35

The paper gives an analysis of possession manifestations in Teleut and Chulym-Turkic by means of noun constructions. Possessive relations in the focus languages form a functional-semantic field, with a grammar core composed of the third-type ezafe constructions as well as combinations of possessive pronouns and nouns marked with possessive affixes. This marking is discourse-featured and optional in case of the 1st and 2nd person possessor, but inalienable possession is manifested by the regular head marking of the personal pronominal possessive constructions. Also non-ezafe and non-possessive usage of the 3rd person possessive affix is featured, which is presumably affected by its article-like function. On the periphery of the possessiveness functional-semantic field there are adyective affixes *-lɨɣ and *-ɣɨ, which imply the possession of an obyect, quality or a feature, or manifest the idea of their accumulation and concentration.

Keywords: Teleut, Chulym-Turkic, possessiveness, ezafe, personal pronominal possessive constructions, nominal word-formation

ON PREDICATIVE POSSESSION IN TELEUT // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2016. Issue 4 (14). P. 50-59

The Teleut language belongs to the Esse-type languages, which express predicative possessive relations within nominal phrases. It employs three main strategies of predicative possession encoding according to the typology of L. Stassen: the locational possessive, the with-possessive and the topic possessive. The locational encoding strategy is typically used with an alienable possessee being the grammatical subject with the possessor in indirect locative case. The with-possessive encoding strategy is the syntactical inversion of the locative strategy; its main function is attributive. The most common predicative possessive encoding strategy in Teleut is the topic possessive with its variety – the genitive possessive. Verbal encoding strategy is expressed with the transitive verbs like ‘to keep’, ‘to hold’, ‘to receive’ etc. which have implicit semantics of possession.

Keywords: Turkic languages, Teleut, possessive, predication; information structure and sentence form

ON THE WORD ORDER OF SIMPLE SENTENCES IN TELEUT // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2020. Issue 4 (30). P. 73-82

Word order typology can be referred to as a poorly developed area of Turkic syntax. The Teleut language belongs to the SOV-type of the left-branching languages. The predicate verb is located at the end of a simple sentence containing one proposition, with a direct object directly adjacent to it. The position of the indirect object and the adverbial may vary depending on the communicative perspective (information structure) of the sentence. The word order in the subordinate clause tends to copy that in the main clause. Functionally, the word order is responsible for the linear distribution of the predicate head and its dependents. The basic word order defines the distribution of verb arguments regardless of the adjuncts’ position. The theta roles of the arguments do not affect their syntactic functions and their position within a sentence. A change in the SOV-word order in Teleut may be concurred by its information structure, for example, when the subject and the predicate become focal and topical parts of the sentence respectively. At the present stage, the influence of Russian bringing about the pragmatically unconditioned SVO-pattern model is noted.

Keywords: simple sentence, word order, information structure, the Teleut language, Turkic lan-guages

SOME LINGUISTIC AND ETHNOGRAPHIC ASPECTS OF THE TOMSK-TATAR KINSHIP AND RITUAL TERMINOLOGY // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2022. Issue 4 (38). P. 48-58

This article deals with a linguistic and ethnographic analysis of the kinship and ritual terminology of the Tomsk Tatars. The Tomsk Tatars are the indigenous population of the Tomsk Ob region, which formed ethnolinguistic groups before the arrival of the Russian-speaking population. The Tomsk Tatars include Kalmaks, Eushtins, and Chats, the latter two groups being grouped in a subdialect – Eushta-Chat. The number of Tomsk Tatars in their traditional places of residence is about 3 thousand people. The article analyzes the data documented during the ethnolinguistic expeditions 2009–2019: Tomsk-Tatar terms divided into lexical-semantic groups in terms of ethnographic classification of family rites (maternity, marriage, burial) and description of family genealogy (terms of kinship). In the course of fieldwork, ethnic stories were recorded, and genealogical schemes were created to identify the family composition and determine family ties within the group and family ties between neighboring villages (responses to family ritual terminology were recorded in both Tatar and Russian). The vocabulary studied refers mainly to the Eushta-Chat subdialect (if so, there is no indication of its origin); if data on the Kalmak subdialect is available, information on their origin is provided. In addition, dialect data from published articles by A. P. Dulzon and R. K. Urazmanova are also given. When it is possible to determine the composition of word forms, a morphological marker is given, a literal translation is also provided, and lexical parallels with the literary Tatar language are copied from open lexicographic sources. The general conclusion of the article is that in the modern kinship and ritual terminology of the Tomsk-Tatar subdialects, there prevail units identical to the literary equivalents, often in a different phonetic form according to the laws of alternation of Turkic phonemes. A number of units do not find parallels with the literary Tatar language, and there are also vocabularies with unclear etymology. Most examples of genealogical terms are direct translations of descriptive terminology from Russian.

Keywords: Tomsk Tatars, Tomsk-Tatar dialects, ritual terms, kinship terms