Semantic Invariant of the Sociative Suffix –lsA in Barguzin Buryat

This article deals with the semantics of the suffix -lsA in Barguzin Buryat. The morpheme originally coded sociative but then also took on the reciprocal function. Field data from Baragkhan ulus (Republic of Buryatia), collected by interviewing local speakers and by elicitation, show that contrary to previous works on Buryat, the Barguzin version of the suffix -lsA does not form traditional assistive clauses and has certain limitations in terms of how a plural argument can be expressed in sociative clauses: essentially, it cannot form sociative clauses in the strict sense, i.e. it does not allow a simple plural noun phrase or coordinated noun phrases as the plural argument. In the paper, the existing meanings of the affix are shown, including different sociative types: subject-oriented, object-oriented, and event-oriented. It has been established that the events described by sociative clauses must be spatially, temporally, and factually related. I argue that all possible meanings of the suffix amount to event plurality as the semantic invariant. Furthermore, the events -lsA refers must be part of the same situation (in the sense of situation semantics). Reciprocal and sociative semantics of different types then result from different possible contextual relations between the events. For example, in the case of a reciprocal clause with two participants, the events share the same set of participants and descriptive properties but differ in the distribution of semantic roles between the participants. Argumentoriented sociative clauses refer to events that have the same descriptive properties but differ in an argument. ‘Attendant action’ -lsA clauses refer to events that may have nothing in common except the basic connection within the situation they both belong to.

Buryat, Mongolic languages, sociative, reciprocal, verb semantics, event plurality, pluractionality, semantic invariant, polysemy