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ATTRIBUTIVE USE OF DEVERBAL NOUNS IN EVENKI // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2022. Issue 2 (36). P. 47-58

The paper considers deverbal nouns with nominalization markers -кӣт, -дяк, -вун. Their meaning and use are considered. The study is based on the corpus of oral stories in Evenki as well as on Evenki newspapers, and on texts translated from Russian. The focus of the study is the mechanism as to how the attributive use appears. The action -кӣт, -дяк, -вун nominalizations occur mostly in recent newspaper texts, whereas in oral stories, locative nominalizations in -кӣт, -дяк and instrumental/resultative nominalizations in -вун can be found. Nominalizations in the attributive position were also found in newspaper texts and texts of the XXI century translated from Russian. We claim that the attributive use of nominalizations under consideration was the consequence of the lack of adjectives with an abstract relational meaning, such as ‘medical’ or ‘preparatory’. The nouns in -кӣт, -дяк, -вун are morphologically nouns, and syntactically they preserve the verbal subcategorization property, and require an Accusative noun. Based on the data of the Accusative object of the verbal stem, we proposed that the -кӣт, -дяк, -вун nominalizations are phrasal (the VP consisting of the verb stem and its object gets nominalized). The nominalization markers -кӣт, -дяк, -вун are NP heads. In the attributive use, the nominalization markers undergoes further grammaticalization and semantic erosion, and becomes the attributivity marker, or relator. The relator links the predicative/attributive word (the -кӣт, -дяк, -вун nominalization) to its subject (the noun). The attributive structure emerges from the predicative structure: these two structures are considered as related and consisting of subject and predicate. To illustrate the derivations, generative grammar structures are used.

Keywords: nominalization, locative, attributive, deverbal noun, Evenki