Причинные и целевые адвербиальные клаузы в горномарийской речи
Causal and Purpose Adverbial Clauses in Hill Mari Speech

Summary/Abstract: The paper describes causal and purpose biclausal constructions in Hill Mari (< Finno-Ugric) based on corpus data. Since Hill Mari speakers also actively use Russian, borrowings, code-mixing and code-switching are common in their speech. In this regard, special attention is paid to Russian borrowed conjunctions. It is shown that in causal constructions Russian conjunctions potomu što and (less often) tak kak ‘because’ are used, whose presence can be explained by the lack of the original Hill Mari clausal conjunction. Purpose constructions use the postpositive conjunction manə̑n ‘in order to’ (“… manə̑ n”), which is combined with the infinitive and imperative/jussive verb forms in constructions with single subject and different subject, respectively. This conjunction can be duplicated by the prepositive Russian conjunction štobə̑ ‘in order to’ (“štobə̑ … manə̑n”) or replaced by it (“štobə̑ …”). First, I show that with regard to the use of the Russian conjunction, the difference between same-subject and different-subject constructions is statistically significant: the Russian conjunction is used more often in the latter type. This pattern can be explained by the fact that in Hill Mari, the conjunctionless purpose infinitive is used more widely than in Russian, thus, the presence of the Russian conjunction is redundant. Second, based on sociolinguistic data, I assume that the use of the Russian conjunction štobə̑ is a consequence of the increasing influence of Russian. Finally, I claim that the presence of Russian conjunctions in the clause (including those duplicated by Hill Mari one) is facilitated by partial congruence: similar verb forms are used in purpose clauses, but the position of the conjunctions is different (prepositive štobə̑ and postpositive manə̑ n).

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