Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/64508

In the present paper I examined some converbial forms of Turkic, Khalkha Mongolian, Korean and Japanese by elicitation in order to reveal their range of function and the criteria to make proper use of them. From the crosslinguistic viewpoint, a typical conditional form tends not to be used for an event such as mado=o aketara tumetai kaze=ga haitte kita (When I opened the window, a cold wind came in). However, the Altaic-type languages such as Japanese often have so-called pseudo-conditional forms which are multi-functional and realize a wide meaning not only of conditional but also temporal, causal and concessive. On the one hand these pseudo-conditional forms exhibit the functional continuity to the proper conditional, and on the other hand they exhibit the functional continuity to the sequential. The results of the research are summarized in Table 1.