Double Marks for Identity of Nouns in Kazak Language

Zhang Dingjing

Double Marks for Identity of Nouns in Kazak Language

(53rd Annual Meeting of the PIAC, St. Petersburg 2010)

As an agglutinative language, Kazak has rather well-knit syntactic structure, one of which’s prominent characteristics is that every noun in “noun+verb” structure has double marks for its identity, one mark is case suffix or postpositions which belongs to noun , the other one is voice suffix which located on verb. The two kinds of marks is in different levels and functions. Case suffix and postpositions indicate relations of basic syntactic structures such as subject-predicate structure, object-verb structure and adverbial-verb structure, and corresponding identity of nouns in the structures, while voice suffix function on the basis of case suffix and postpositions, mainly showing different characters of subjective noun for related activities expressed by verbs.

Marks which belong to noun: case suffix and postpositions
1. Qasen-0 aldï. “Qasen got.”
2. Qasen-di aldï. “(He or they) got Qasen.”
3. Qasen-ge aldï. “(He or they) got for Qasen.”
4. Qasen-nen aldï. “(He or they) got from Qasen.”
5. Bazar-da aldï. “(He or they) got in market.”
6. Dollar-men aldï. “(He or they) got with US dollar.”
7. Qasen-dey aldï. “(He or they) got like Qasen did.”
8. Qasen üšin aldï. “(He or they) got for Qasen.”
9. Qasen arqïlï aldï. “(He or they) got through Qasen.”
10. Qasen retinde aldï. “(He or they) got (some body) as Qasen.”
11. Qasenge deyin aldï. “(He or they) got till Qasen.”
12. Qasenniŋ atïnan aldï. “(He or they) got in the name of Qasen.”
13. Qasenniŋ ornïna aldï. “(He or they) got (some body) instead of Qasen.”

Marks which belong to verb: voice suffix
14. Qasen šeš-0-ti. “Qasen unfastened (something).”
15. Qasen šeš-il-di. “Qasen was unfastened.”
16. Qasen šeš-in-di. “Qasen took off his clothes.” (He unfastened himself.)
17. Qasen šeš-is-ti. “Qasen helped to unfasten.”
18. Qasen šeš-kiz-di. “Qasen made (someone) unfastened.”