The Use of Nominal Plurality Markers in Modern Khalkha Mongolian and Buryat

Introduction. The article deals with the use of nominal plurality markers in modern Khalkha and Buryat. Nominal plurality markers are used optionally in the Mongolic languages. However, in Buryat they are used more often than in Khalkha. Goals. In order to find out how much the figures differ at the moment (and then make some relevant conclusions), the author has collected two small corpora of newspaper articles on politics, economy, culture, and sports published in the Buryat online newspaper Buryad Unen and Mongolian web-based edition Unuudur written from April to August of 2020 — in the period preceding the start of this research, as it was critical for the author to have the utmost up-to-date materials. Materials. The Mongolian mini-corpus comprises 10 032 words, and the Buryat mini-corpus consists of 10 261 words. Newspaper articles have been chosen as study material because publicistic writings absorb language novelties faster and in greater amount than fiction or scholarly works, thus better reflecting the present-day state of the language. The field data could be a more reliable source of material but field work is currently hindered because of the epidemic situation. The author decided not to use the online corpora, which are way bigger than the manually collected ones (and this is certainly their great advantage) because it was necessary to compare texts similar in subject and volume, and written approximately at the same period of time. It is not always technically feasible to restrict the field of search in the online corpora, which makes it difficult to compare the obtained results for the two languages. Results. The collected data shows that in the Mongolian newspaper articles the plurality markers are used about 3,5 times as frequently as in the Buryat ones. Along with it, Middle Mongolian plurality markers are known to have been used about four times as frequently as in Modern Mongolian. In the conclusion the author poses questions for further study which arose after obtaining the quantitative data.

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