MORPHOSYNTACTIC ACCOMMODATION OF CHINESE CONTENT WORDS IN KAZAKH: THE CASE OF KAZAKH-CHINESE LANGUAGE CONTACT

Abstract

Based on the close analysis of naturally occurring recordings featuring Kazakh speakers living in Xinjiang, this study explores various strategies of how such Chinese content words are accommodated morphosyntactically in spoken Kazakh. I based my analysis on a total of 6.8 hours of conversation taken from the Multimedia Corpus of Modern Spoken Kazakh (Filchenko et al., 2023). Among the 161 Chinese content words identified, excluding nouns, verbs accounted for approximately 83% (n = 133) of the sample, with adjectives and adverbs accounting for 13% (n = 31) and 4% (n = 7), respectively. As for nouns, which was the most abundant category, I identified as many as 250 nouns in just one half of the sample, which could safely be extrapolated to over 450 for the entire data. The main focus of the project is the accommodation of Chinese verbs since the accommodations of words from all other categories (nouns, adjectives, and adverbs) were accomplished only using the direct insertion strategy whereby they were directly inserted into the position of their Kazakh equivalents, normally following the Kazakh inflectional rules. My findings suggest that the accommodation of Chinese verbs into Kazakh is accomplished via four main morphosyntactic strategies: light verb strategy (73.5%), direct insertion (10%), indirect insertion (3.5%), and paradigm insertion (13%). Among them, the light verb strategy is the most common in Kazakh, 73.5% of verbs were accommodated with this strategy, which agrees with Wohlgemuth’s (2009) findings that “language with the dependent-head (OV) orientation strongly prefer the Light Verb Strategy” (p. 203). As such, this study has attempted to shed light on the morphosyntactic strategies Kazakh speakers employ to accommodate Chinese content words in their everyday speech, contributing to the broader understanding of how borrowing and accommodation are accomplished in contact situations. Particularly, the specific focus on Kazakh-Chinese contact in Xinjiang, a culturally and linguistically diverse region of China, addresses a long-standing gap in the literature of contact linguistics.