Modal constructions in the Volga-Kama sprachbund: an areal and diachronic study

Principal Investigator: Dr. Aigul Zakirova

To be started in 2025.

The aim of this project is to investigate the evolution of modal constructions in the languages of the Volga-Kama sprachbund and thus broaden our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the evolution of modality and of its constructional encoding in terms of both language-internal and contact-induced change.

The project relies on both present-day data (spoken corpora, grammar and elicited data) and published historical sources (written texts and oral texts collected around the turn of 20th century). The work programme consists of the following major tasks:
1) describing in detail, or profiling, the modal constructions in Volga-Kama languages, including both present-day and older varieties;
2) establishing diachronic paths of, and links between, these modal constructions and other (also non-modal) constructions by applying the Historical-Comparative Method;
3) analyzing the attested diachronic developmental steps from the semantic, diachronic and constructional perspectives and scrutinizing contact effects in the area.

The project will be a significant contribution to the field of diachronic typology of modals. First, it aims at mitigating the bias towards Western European languages in this area of research. Second, in contrast to many Western European languages, modals in the Volga-Kama languages do not form a homogeneous morphosyntactic class. Rather, modal meanings are expressed by morphosyntactically diverse constructions, the main parameters of variation here being the locus of expression of the modal meaning (separate modal predicate vs. affix), argument encoding (both indexing and flagging), (im)personality and the expression of TAM-categories. This diversity of modal constructions provides a glimpse into a variety of constructional changes that may have possibly led to the observed outcomes. Finally, Volga-Kama languages (belonging to Turkic and Uralic families) share many common features in morphology, syntax and lexicon, including MAT- and PAT-borrowings in the domain of modality. Therefore, this area provides rich material for a study of contact-induced change of modal constructions.