About the project

Particles in general are uninflected, short unstressed words, often enclitic, some occur preferably in oral speech with little or no propositional meaning, others are essential parts of the grammar. They have many functions. In her book on functional words in Finno-Ugric, Majtinskaja (1982: 123–135) classified several groups of particles: demonstrative particles (e.g. equivalents of Russ. vot! ‘here!’), restrictive (or focus) particles (e.g. ‘only’), specifying particles (e.g. Hung. éppen ‘just, exactly’), enforcing particles (e.g. Russ. že, Finn. =pA, =hAn), degree particles (‘almost, hardly’), affirmative particles (e.g. Est. kull ‘of course, well’), negation particles (‘not’), question particles (e.g. Finn. =kO), modal particles of doubt, uncertainty, conviction, wish, admission, hortativity, subjective quotes (see also the classes of modal particles in Majtinskaja 1983: 132). Clitic particles are found as question markers (Fi. =kO, Udm. =a), as quotative markers (Ko. pö), contrastive markers (Ko. =tö, =sö), conditional sentence markers (Khant. ki, Ko. kö). In grammars they may be described as essential parts of mood forms (Kamas =zä in the conjunctive, Russian by in the conditional), they may count as equivalents (Ko. med optative particle), or they are primarily adverbs which come with a secondary function, more pragmatic than grammatical (e.g. German modal particles). DIPs expressing epistemic stance e.g. in Komi are, among others, taj ‘apparently’, ödvakö ‘hardly’, öd ‘indeed (affirmative)’, nö ‘actually, also’, žö id., and others (Bubrix 1949: 194–196); and in Udmurt dyr ‘assumedly’, ojdo ‘still’, leśa ‘well’, kaď ‘apparently’ and others (Winkler 2011: 136–137).

DIPs are a highly understudied field in most minor Uralic languages, so e.g. for Votic and Ingrian the general study by Majtinskaja (1982) lists some particles, but does not offer any analysis. The two most known Votic and Ingrian descriptions by Ariste (1968) and Laanest (1978) do not even mention the particles. A preliminary description of Votic discourse particles is provided by Rozhanskiy (2005) and by Markus and Rozhanskiy (2017: 623-627); the research is based on the corpus of texts collected in the 2000s. Thus, there are cross-linguistic descriptive studies like Majtinskaja (1982, 1983), very few single studies like Erina 1997 for Mordvin, but these studies quite superficially describe specific functions and distribution of the markers. The current project proposal tackles at the collection and classification of discourse particles in order to improve their description in grammars, especially their “co-operation” with other grammatical categories, like moods, the understanding of their syntactic and semantic scope and their position in utterances.

The background of the project are three so far independent research activities: (i) nuclear pitch accent and focus (new information) marking in Komi and Udmurt (HRP Tooni aktsent 2017–2018, G. Klumpp); (ii) New quotative indices in Permic languages, epistemic functions of quotative indexes, as part of the dissertation of Denys Teptiuk; (iii) Discourse particles in Beserman Udmurt (Iuliia Zubova, Timofey Arkhangelskiy). During these research activities it often turned out that the correct interpretation of (recorded) utterances depends on a correct understanding of epistemic DIPs as e.g. in (2a–b), but the range of these particles and their meanings and functions has not been sufficiently described.

2. a. Komi

aaa     abu       kolökö                             tajö            byt’t’ö         kutšöm=kö      loktis
INTJ   NEG       maybe/apparently  DEM          like/as.if       which=INDEF come.PST3S

‘Aaa, no maybe he’s like something (.) came from somewhere’ (gymn5, 03:27–03:31).

b. Beserman Udmurt

a      soizlə           pe           tri      čʼetyresta=a                          mar=a     tərono=uk.
and  3PL.DAT  QUOT    three four.hundred[Rus]=Q       what=Q   pay.DEB=DIP

Ma   so     duno                          evəl=n’i,                  ben=a,  tri        čʼetyresta?
DIP  that expensive.ATTR  be.NEG.PRS=DIP  yes=Q   three  four.hundred [Rus]

‘And they are supposedly to pay him three [thousand] four hundred or something like this.
Isnʼt it too expensive, right, three [thousand] four hundred?’

Particles are also essential morphemes in the expression of modal and epistemic meanings in the grammar of many languages. The more conventionalized they are, the more likely is their appearance in the grammars under categories like “verbal mood”, or “modal operators”. E.g. the particle med in Udmurt and Komi is acknowledged by grammars as a marker of optative (or jussive) whereas Komi es’kö is not acknowledged as a marker of a conditional mood. But they are often treated as extragrammatical items. The meaning of so called modal particles is often difficult to grasp, but where it regularly occurs as e.g. the Russian conditional particle by (with past tense) it is assigned a status in grammar. In Finno-Ugric languages in contact with Russian (but not only there) synthetic moods are often competing with mood particles, or they occur in combinations. In grammars one may read that a certain synthetic mood is encountered in older texts, but rare, or even extinct today, replaced by a particle, e.g. in Hill Mari (Bradley et al. in prep.). The grammar of literary languages does not cover dialectal and substandard variation. The current project wants to approach the study of particles in the field of modality epistemicity by looking at their collocations with moods, their relation to moods, paying thereby attention to language internal variation.