Co-occurrence of the adjective ut ‘long’ (evidence from the kalmyk national corpus)

Abstract

Since the development of software that serves the needs of the Kalmyk National Corpus has made it possible to apply digital research methods for the purposes of Kalmyk vocabulary studies, the systematic description of adjectives in the Kalmyk language is thus a new issue. 
The article examines the lexical co-occurrence of the adjective ut ‘long’ which means a long length and characterizes flat pulled and flexible cord-like surfaces, antonymous to the word akhr ‘short’; it also contains a typological classification table of the adjective ut in Kalmyk with two groups of objects identified as well as the types of the objects.
When combined with the words that characterize human speech and time lines, the adjective ut has a figurative meaning ‘of long continuance’, i.e. there is a transference of the meaning from space to time: ut tuuj ‘long stories’, ut soe ‘long night’, ut oedr ‘long day’, ut dun ‘lingering song’.
The adjective ut mostly co-occurs with nouns that denote parts of the body, flexible objects, infinite spaces; rarely co-occurs with words that denote deepenings on a surface, apertures and coreless pulled objects. Rarely if ever one can see the combination ut nyukn ‘long pit’, in most cases they say gyun nyukn ‘deep pit’. The considered combinations of the adjective ut can serve as the basis for further detailed research on the co-occurrence of adjectives.