Создание базы данных коннекторов малоизученного идиома: опыт татышлинского удмуртского
Creating a Database of Connectives for an Understudied Language: The Case of Tatyshly Udmurt

Summary/Abstract: The article describes the process of creating a database of connectives for the Tatyshly dialect of Udmurt (Bashkortostan, Russia). Elements that are typically treated separately in different theoretical frameworks and grammatical descriptions are here systematically collected and uniformly annotated, allowing for a typologically interpretable overview of these units. The database includes four modules: reference, semantic, diachronic and syntactic. Together, they provide a comprehensive description of each connective. Within the semantic module, each connective is classified as belonging to a specific semantic field. A significant number of connectives are borrowings from Russian and Tatar, languages in close areal contact with Tatyshly Udmurt, as well as so-called framing connectives, which are pairs of synonymous Udmurt and Russian forms. Such duplication may, on the one hand, help mark the clausal boundaries more clearly when the connective appears at the left or right edge of the sentence, and on the other hand, make clause semantics more explicit, facilitating when the Udmurt connective occurs at the end of a preposed clause. The syntactic module describes several parameters: the position of the connective within its clause, the position of its clause within the sentence, the presence and characteristics of a (quasi-)correlate in the associated clause, the possibility of use in an independent sentence, the number of components in the main part, and the type of clause introduced by the connective. The high proportion of clauseinitial connectives, unusual for a head-final language, can be explained by two factors: numerous Russian borrowings which preserve the syntactic behaviour of the donor language, and the use of correlative and focus constructions as connectives, which are themselves typically clause-initial.

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