Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/80946

KEYWORDS : チュヴァシ語;名詞化;名詞節;述語性

The Chuvash nominalizer -i/-ě, which is identical in the form with the 3rd person possessive suffix, forms not only noun phrases (e.g. pïsăkk-i [big-NMLZ] “the big one”), but also noun clauses (e.g. anne čirle-n-i [mother be.sick-PTCP.PST-NMLZ] “that mother got sick”). Luutonen (2011) argues that -i has a function that forms subordinate clauses, and regards it as a syntactic nominalizer. Pavlov (2014) has set up the category of distinction (категория выделения) as a grammatical category for nouns and adjectives, and states that the distinction suffix -i has a function that forms subordinate clauses. However, in my observation, although rarely, the allomorph -ě may also appear. Moreover, the distribution of this suffix when it functions as a clause-nominalizer is not described in detail in the prior research. From the research, it became clear that 1) although the distribution is limited, the allomorph -ě may also appear, and 2) the nominalization by directly attaching -i/-ě without copula is the most common when the predicate of a noun clause is a participle, and the least common when it is a noun. Based on the findings, I argue that 1) supports the theory of previous research that the nominalizer -i partially evolved from the 3rd person possessive suffix, and from 2), the higher the level of predicatehood of the predicate element, the more common the clause-nominalization by directly attaching -i/-ě is.