Complex Sentences with the Russian Conjunction ‘Jesli’ in Udmurt Speech: The Role of Incongruent Verb Forms
DOI: 10.23951/2307-6119-2026-3-45-57
This article examines the use of the Russian conditional conjunction jesli (‘if’) in modern Udmurt speech based on corpus data. Clauses with the conjunction jesli are common on social media and in blog posts, but are avoided in the press to adhere to literary norms. The Russian conjunction can be inserted into the clause in three ways. It can appear alone, but more often it is paired with the Udmurt conjunction ke, which is not allowed in clause-initial position. A much less frequent strategy uses the complex conjunction jesli ke at the beginning of the clause. I show that the choice of strategy, observable even in data from a single speaker, may be influenced by differences between Russian and Udmurt in the selection of verbal forms in subordinate clauses. The contrast is most evident in two types of conditionals. The joint use of jesli and ke is preferred in (1) real conditionals with future reference (If it rains, I will not come), where Udmurt uses a past-tense form and Russian uses a futuretense form, and (2) unreal conditionals (If it rained, I would not come), where both languages use functionally similar but structurally different conditional forms: the Udmurt form in -sal versus the Russian strategy with a form homonymous with a past-tense form and the clitic by, which usually appears after jesli, thus creating a complex conjunction reflected in Udmurt data as well. Such incongruity makes it harder for the Russian conjunction to replace its Udmurt counterpart, necessitating fully morphosyntactic changes. In contrast, conditionals with present-tense forms more often feature jesli alone rather than jesli with ke. The strategy with jesli ke can be considered an optional intermediate stage in the shift from the Udmurt to the Russian structure of conditionals, which involves overcoming the positional incongruency between the two conjunctions.
Keywords: Udmurt language, Russian language, complex sentence, conditional, language contact
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Issue: 3, 2026
Series of issue: Issue 3
Rubric: LINGUISTICS
Pages: 45 — 57
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