Emotive-Evaluative Causative Constructions in the Buryat Language

This paper describes emotive-evaluative causative constructions of guilt and condemnation in the Buryat language. The relevance of the work arises from the modern integrated approach to the study of such functional and semantic categories as causativity, as well as from the increasing interest in the problems of the category of emotivity in linguistics. The relevance stems from the need to study emotions and their representation in language from the perspective of linguistics. The main goal of this work is to determine the emotive-evaluative potential in causative constructions with the meaning of guilt and condemnation in the Buryat language and to try to identify its national and cultural peculiarities. The novelty of the work arises from the fact that this problem has not been practically studied on the material of the Buryat language before. The theoretical and methodological basis of the work was formed by the works of domestic and foreign linguists: V. I. Shakhovsky, A. Vezhbitskaya, I. V. Trufanova, and K. Izard. The feeling of guilt is one of the basic emotions. Condemnation refers to the moral evaluation of certain phenomena of reality, actions, and behaviors of people. In Buryat’s causative constructions, one can notice a close connection between the semantics of guilt and condemnation. The material of the study consists of a solid sample of causative constructions contained in the electronic corpus of the Buryat language and data obtained by observing the speech of native speakers. As a result, it is found that causative constructions in the Buryat language have an emotive-evaluative potential. In order to express the feeling of guilt and related condemnation, the so-called constructions of “guilt of the causer” are used, in which the subject himself is guilty of what happened. The constructions of “fault of the causator” are quite specific; they show the peculiarities of the linguistic worldview in understanding causative relations. In the constructions of "guilt of the causer," the speaker often appears himself as the causer, and such constructions most vividly express the feeling of guilt, awareness of one's mistakes, and weakness.

Causativity, emotivity, emotions, evaluation, causative constructions, Buryat language