Inflectional Types of Kalmyk Verbs: a Perspective from Automatic Text Processing

The article describes inflectional types of Kalmyk verbs required for large-scale automatic text processing. Special attention is paid to differentiating features of word-forming, form-building, and inflectional affixes within the Kalmyk language. The results of the study aiming to delineate certain Kalmyk morphological paradigms are essentially preliminary, and shall be clarified and supplemented as the scope of source materials (i.e., both the word-list and number of language facts to be discovered throughout texts to be investigated) increases. Still, the already discovered inflectional clusters have made it possible to create a morphological analyzer for the Kalmyk National Corpus. So far, a total of 11 verb inflectional types have been identified, the later containing insignificant differences. The groups are virtually different in causative formation. The paper is unique to contain a number of variants of the causative affix: -ул, -һ, -х, -лһ. Verb forms are basically developed with the aid of same affixes, e. g., mode forms Pass, Soc, Recp; aspect forms Dur1, Dur2, Compl; indicative forms Pres, Progr, Evd, Pst, Rem; oblique-mode forms Impr, Juss1, Opt, Juss2; adverbial participial forms Cond, Term, Succ, Prel, Purp, Conc, Prog, Ipfv, Ant, Mod; participial forms Pass, Pros, Pres, Mom, Hab, Perf, Fut.
All the inflectional verb types experience changes related to vowel harmony and morphonological sequences at joints of stems ending with vowel sounds and affixes beginning with vowel sounds — this gives rise to inter-fixations which are generally typical for the Kalmyk language. Besides, all verbs witness characteristic morphotactical interchanges, such as -чана / -җана in (present) progressive time, and -ч / -җ in past resultative time and syndetical adverbial participles. Moreover, there are morphonological interchanges in the iterative and apprehensive. The latter witnesses the interchange -вза / -ува before the consonant к and л, which is explained by Kalmyk sound compatibility patterns respectively. When it comes to develop iterative forms to verb stems ending with -г, -р, -рǎ, -с, -сǎ, -сǎ, -дǎ, -л, there emerges the inter-fixation -х-, -һ-.

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