Jorma Luutonen Bücher

Chuvash features three intriguing morphemes: -i, -xi, and -sker, which have captivated scholars for over a century. These suffixes resemble derivational endings that create adjectives but also extend beyond lexical derivation. They frequently attach to inflectional forms, such as case forms and participles, acting as syntactic converters that alter the syntactic properties of the underlying forms. For example, a case form can transform into an adjective-like entity, or a participle can become a noun-like unit. Their primary function is defined as syntactic nominalization. The work provides a critical survey of previous research alongside text-corpus-based quantitative and qualitative analyses of the suffixes' distribution and functions in Modern Chuvash literary language. All examples are transliterated into Latin characters and include morphological glosses. The historical-comparative section argues that -xi, and to some extent -i, can be traced back to Proto-Turkic *-ki, which has descendants in Common Turkic languages, such as Turkish -ki. The book features separate chapters on Turkish and Tatar, discussing the etymology of *-ki. Additionally, it surveys the functional counterparts of the Chuvash suffixes in Mongolic, Tungusic, Uralic languages, and Russian, facilitating typological and areal linguistic generalizations about this phenomenon.