Pronouns as a means to express relations of words in different types of languages

Abstract

© 2019 Kalmyk Scientific Centre of Russian Academy of Sciences. All Rights Reserved. Introduction. The article contains a comparative analysis of grammatical processes that have occurred in different languages widespread in the same territory. The comparison is implemented in the aspect of using pronouns as a way of building new grammatical formants in the language. The main goal of the article is to study the pronoun as a class which exists in each language and carries out global grammatical processes, which became the basis for the later processes of correction of languages of different types. The paper considers the essence of secondary relationship of languages undeservedly paid little attention on behalf of researchers. It emerged as a result of the long-term contact of nations and, as a consequence, mutual influence of languages. The link to perform syntactic relations is constituted by pronouns that had particularly strong influence on the grammatical units in Turkic and Iranian languages, in particular, in functioning of izafet. Materials. The source basis for considering these processes in our research is Turkic and Iranian languages whose izafet structures are manifested in the character of their semantic content: a possessive category in Turkic languages and a definitive category in Iranian languages. In Slavic and Germanic languages, pronominal formants, in addition to representing the relationship between words, express the grammatical category of certainty / uncertainty (in Germanic languages) and serve as a means to recognize adjectives from the point of view of grammar (in East Slavic languages). Results. The paper concludes that the mutual influence of languages results from territorial proximity and long-term contact. Slavic languages, Russian in particular, had been exposed to great influences of Turkic and Finno-Ugric languages that surrounded them geographically, where the emphasis was laid on the particles used to communicate and determine the position of content words. These particles, as is known, were absent in the Old Slavic language, and their function was performed by pronouns. As a result, we come to the conclusion that from the viewpoint of grammatical categories languages that have been in long-term contact are connected with the same language processes.