A study of cases of correspondence of constructions with postpositions to serial verb constructions (based on the material of Mongolian language texts of the 13th, 17th and 20th centuries)

Abstract

The article deals with cases of correspondence of constructions with postpositions to serial verbal constructions, an attempt is made to identify the typological features of verbal serialization in the Mongolian language. As a research material, written monuments of different time slices of the Mongolian language are used, namely Latin transcription of the chronicle “The Secret History of the Mongols” of the XIII century; the chronicle “Altan tobchi” of the 17th century; translation of the “Secret History of the Mongol” into the modern Mongolian language of the XX century. Based on the analysis, the number of similar correspondences on specific time slices was revealed. So, in the texts of older written monuments, one case of the use of serial verbal constructions was found to convey the same meaning, which in the modern text is expressed by a postpositional construction. In all the other 12 cases of such correspondences – the serial construction occurs precisely in the text of the 20th century, there is a tendency for an increase in the number of correspondences of postpositions to serial constructions over the course of the history of the language. Also, based on the considered examples of serial constructions found in our comparative study, we can assume that the Mongolian language is characterized by serialization of an asymmetric type.

Keywords

• Mongolian
• postposition
• serial verb constructions
• serialization
• монгольский язык
• послелог