The Concept of ‘Straight’ and Its Semantic Relations in Tatyshly Udmurt

This article deals with the semantics of lexemes with the meaning ‘straight(ly)’ (e.g., about the direction of motion) in the Tatyshly subdialect of Udmurt (Peripheral-Southern dialect, Southern variety). Methodologically, the study is follows the frame-based approach to lexical typology, which presupposes the investigation of lexical semantics through collocational analysis. The majority of the data was collected by elicitation in the Tatyshly district of the Republic of Bashkortostan (the villages of Nizhnebaltachevo, Staryj Kyzyl-Jar, Ivanovka, Novye Tatyshly, Starokal’mijarovo as well as Verkhnebaltachevo, Bigineevo, Aribash, Urazgil’dy). In addition, the text corpus collected in the field was used, and as a broader background, the data of some other varieties of Udmurt, mainly from dictionaries and corpora, were taken into account. The material from Udmurt is compared with typological generalizations about the lexemes with the meaning ‘straight(ly)’. I show that the meaning in question in Tatyshly Udmurt can be expressed by the lexeme šon′er (and its derivative šon′erak) and by the lexeme ves′ak. I analyze the distributional differences between these lexemes in the contexts in which they describe a straight line with different topological properties and motion along a straight line. Their abstract uses are also systematized. I discuss the secondary development of the meaning ‘straight(ly),’ which is typologically sophisticated: šon′er is probably related to the Proto-Uralic root for ‘good, healthy’ (and has no obvious cognates among the lexemes referring to a straight line in other Uralic languages). At the same time, ves′ak is derived from a universal quantifier ves′ borrowed from Russian. The quantificational semantics is fundamental to ves′ak in other Udmurt varieties for which detailed data are available. In Tatyshly Udmurt, however, it is unproductive and replaced by a narrower class of usages referring to a straight line.

Uralic languages, Udmurt language, Tatyshly subdialect, lexical typology, semantics, polysemy