Mongolian Analytical Constructions: a Quantitative Perspective*

Abstract

The article attempts to measure the frequency use of analytical word forms in Mongolian. One of the difficulties is that the boundaries of the framework for such analytical constructions are unclear enough. Evidently, the scope is of diffusive nature, i.e. the boundaries are vague. However, those can be investigated by quite precise methods, given that the latter essentially comply with a real object, i.e. be quantitative. This requires that at some initial stage of research it should be settled which formally detected characteristics are typical for analytical constructions. Heuristically, it is admitted that the ‘wide’ approach towards analytical forms represented within the so called theory of grammaticalization (or grammatization) is most fruitful; but the approach should be supplemented with quantitative methods developed in corpus linguistics. With evidence from the General Corpus of Mongolian (GCM / GKMYa-1а), the paper identifies most frequently used analytical word forms. The materials are represented in the form of statistical tables, the word forms being arranged in direct alphabetical order of corresponding lexemes. The ranking list comprises not all structural analytical models of Mongolian syntactic molecules, but rather - the most commonly used ones. The threshold requirement for an analytical word form to be included in the list is 312 instances within the GCM-1a, or 275 ipm. The work shows most commonly used analytical word forms with an absolute frequency of over 10 instances, a relative one of theirs being 9 ipm. The GCM-1a contains 1 818 such word forms.