THE SEMANTICS OF THE AUXILIARY VERB ‘QOY-’ IN MODERN SPOKEN KAZAKH

Abstract

In this undergraduate thesis, I investigate the semantics of the auxiliary verb construction qoy- in its combination with four grammatical categories – the animacy of the subject, the transformativity of the main verb, the polarity of the verb complex, and the mood – in Modern Spoken Kazakh (MSK). This paper provides a thorough semantic analysis of one out of 28 Kazakh auxiliary verbs to understand the underlying principles of the native intuition in navigating between non-complex and complex (the one incorporating the auxiliary qoy-) equivalents. Two main research questions here were “What semantic meanings does the incorporation of the auxiliary verb qoy- contribute to the created verb complex in MSK?” and “What linguistic factors need to be present along with the auxiliary verb qoy- to express a particular semantic meaning?” In this work, I propose morphosyntactic and semantic frameworks, through which we can understand the similarities and differences between the two counterparts of verb complexes: the qoy-less ones opposed to their equivalents with qoy-. Towards achieving this goal, four hours of audio recordings from Multimedia Corpus of Spoken Kazakh Language were analysed to create a database of verb complexes with the auxiliary verb qoy- that are different by subject animacy, lexical verb transformativity, polarity, and mood. Then, a comparative analysis was conducted to elicit semantic contributions of qoy-, which were systematised into five categories: unexpected completion, deliberate refusal, unnatural non-action, undesirable reiteration, and expected non-completion.