CONSTRUCTIONS WITH THE MARKER KAD’JOS IN TATYSHLY UDMURT

Abstract

The study investigates one of the uses of the equative marker kad’ in Tatyshly Udmurt — the construction N kad’ jos, where N is a noun or a pronoun and kad’ jos is a form of the marker kad’ with the plural noun affix -jos (cf. pet’a kad’ jos [Petya like-pl] ‘[somebody] like Petya’). This construction is attested in works on the grammar of Udmurt, but its morphosyntactic and semantic restrictions are not properly discussed. According to my field data collected in the Tatyshy district of the Republic of Bashkortostan, the restrictions on the dependent of the marker kad’ jos are formulated in terms of the animacy hierarchy. The speakers allow the use of all personal pronouns, proper names, as well as human animate nouns; in some idiolects it is also possible to use non-human animate nouns, and all the interviewed speakers rejected constructions with an inanimate noun as a dependent of kad’ jos. I propose an analysis of this construction which suggests the presence of a phonologically covert head noun. The construction N kad’ jos is a dependent of this head noun, and thus may be considered as an equative construction belonging to the nominal type, cf. the other type of equative constructions where the phrase with kad’ is a dependent of the predicate.