A Grammar of Spoken Buryat-Mongolian by A. M. Orlov: Verb. The Category of Voice

Materials. The article examines A Grammar of Spoken Buryat-Mongolian issued by A. Orlov in 1878. A. Orlov’s Grammar was written as a practical guide to study the Buryat language. The work aims to revisit the category of voice within the Grammar in comparison with the facts of modern Buryat, to compare Grammar’s language materials dealing with the category to present-day grammatical voice structures.
Goals. The paper ascertains that A. Orlov’s Grammar contains quite precise characteristics of the Buryat verb, including voices of the verb, their morphological indicators. The illustrative materials indicate his sufficiently deep knowledge of lexical and grammatical features of the Buryat language.
In the Introduction to the ‘Verb’ section, A. Orlov divides verbs into primitives and derivatives, exemplifying the differences throughout extensive materials, revealing a deep understanding of the structure of Buryat verbs derived from nominal parts of speech, adverbs and particles which was extremely rare for a non-native speaker in those times.
When examining the language, the paper seeks to highlight A. Orlov’s scientific approach to Buryat grammar studies: his Grammar considered all varieties of the Buryat voice, ways of expression, marking and partially ― polysemy markers; it also considers the morphological indicators of the verb selected by A. Orlov as indicators of the voice. The analysis of the voices in modern Buryat revealed as follows: it is difficult to say that morphological indicators of the Buryat voices unequivocally convey meanings of the passive, or сausative, or reciprocal, or any other voices. For example, suffixes of the causative (hortative) can have a passive meaning, and it may be necessary to turn to the semantic-syntactic level of the language to differentiate between the meanings.
Results. In modern Buryat, voice meanings are often transmitted in a syntactic or lexical way (e. g., reflexive meaning). The verbal suffixes listed in Orlov’s Grammar received further development, their taxonomy was replenished, and the category of voice has been considered wider ― including lexical, semantic, syntactic levels of the Buryat language, although after a century and a half after the release of the Grammar morphological indicators have basically remained unchanged.
The article draws conclusions about the need to consider the voice from the viewpoint of its multi-level expression; description of the understudied forms -ootey, eetey, -aatai which, in the author’s opinion, arose under the influence of the Russian language.
In the Buryat language — like in other Mongolian languages when it comes to convey grammatical meanings within a word — the influence of the lexical meaning is often observed, especially in cases when the grammatical category has no specialized, regular means of expression. In the category of voice, the expression plan and the content plan are asymmetric, so nowadays one can say that it is the functional-semantic field that gives rise to lexical-grammatical microfields.

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