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A corpus-based diachronic study of copulas and pseudo-copulas in Mongolian

Su-ying HSIAO

Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica

suying@sinica.edu.tw

This paper reports some preliminary results of an ongoing study of copulas and pseudo-copulas in Mongolian from a diachronic perspective.

Constructions containing copulas a- ‘to be’, bö-/bü-/bui/buyu ‘to be’, bi ‘is, exists’, bayi- ‘to be, stay, exist, live, reside’, yum ‘thing’ and pseudo-copulas bol- ‘to become; to be; to exist’ were examined. 

Preliminary results show that a- is in near-complementary distribution with bö-/bü-/bu-. a- and bü- were gradually replaced by bayi- and yum. Some forms of bö-/bü-/bu- were lexicalized. For instance, bui ‘being, existing; is, am, are’ was grammaticalized into an interrogative particle, while buyu and bolun (a converb form of bol-) developed the conjunctive ‘or’ and ‘and’ usages respectively. We also suggest that copular bö-/bü-/bu- originated from the imperative verb bü- ‘don’t do’, a development in parallel with that of deriving bayi- ‘to be, stay, exist, live, reside’ from the verb bayi- ‘to stand; to stop’