V

Abstract

There exists a rich system of nominal declension in Mongolic languages. The cases found universally are the nominative, genitive, accusative, dative-locative, ablative, and instructive. The nominative case has no special marking and, thus, coincides with the bare stem of the word. The oblique cases are expressed by agglutination of special suffixes to the stem. At the same time, the bare unmarked stem can also frequently be used in the meaning of oblique cases, cf. Khalkh. Ulaanbaatar yawaw = Ulaanbaatar-t yawaw ‘[I/you/he] went to Ulan-Batur’. One can easily see that, from the point of view of contensive typology, the structure of the Mongolic case paradigm demonstrates a complex of nominative-type features. The subjects of both intransitive and transitive verbs are expressed by the nominative case, whilst the special accusative expresses the direct object; also the genitive, as some researchers (I. Meščaninov, G. Klimov and others) assume, mainly correlates with the nominative type. Nor does the existence of unmarked stem-forms in oblique case functions contradict the nominative typology: the same situation holds in many other unquestionably nominative languages, including Turkic, FinnoUgric, some Indo-European, and others. The nominal stem in Mongolic mostly remains unchanged when affixed (although in some languages the omission of a non-phonemic reduced vowel is possible, as in Khalkh. chono ‘wulf’, acc. chon-yg; oron ‘place’, acc. orn-yg). Exceptions to this rule are the so-called “nouns with unstable final -n”. Essentially they have two stems differing by the presence/absence of final -n. In Khalka-Mongolian, Buryat and Kalmyk the rules that regulate the use of these two stems before case markers are mostly identical. The stem with -n is used in the genitive, the dativelocative and the ablative cases; thus with the word for ‘horse’ (Khalkh. mor', Bur. morin, Kalm. Mörn):